When thick green stalks push through February ground, I’m reminded of cooking daffodils for my husband.

I’m from New York City, where March’s small yellow flowers bloomed in fenced tree beds. I came to Middle Tennessee for a six-month artist-residency on a donkey farm, planning to return to teaching chess and making theater.

Though it was October, the leaves hadn’t turned, everything was startling green beneath the widest sky I’d ever seen.

Following February’s frost, green stems emerged. Thinking these were hostas, which reportedly taste like asparagus, I gathered them for supper.

Wanting to impress my roommate —- and a new friend — I sauteed them with steak and rice, surprised by their bitterness.

When he stepped outside, I blurted: “I want to marry him!” then clapped my hands over my mouth and vomited.

“You’re crazy!” My roommate said, rushing to the bathroom.

Our guest was from the Smoky Mountains. He’d discreetly avoided the foliage – and the food poisoning.

I never again mistook daffodils for hostas, or forgot that night.

Back home, I’d kept forty plants in tiny kitchens. My dream (as I wrote in Business Insider) was a patch of dirt to grow in, but I couldn’t imagine leaving my chess students or theater.

That spring, my New Yorker parents followed my sister’s growing family to New Jersey’s fishing towns, offering me their rent-stabilized apartment.

Then I got kicked off the donkey farm for “falling in love” – I was ready to move on, not back.

Smoky Mountain Man and I moved into a nearby cabin.

Under the guidance of our landladies, expert farmers, I learned rototillers, mattocks, quality soil, and the endless digging Southern life requires.

Moonflowers vined our fairy-tale cabin, opening white blooms at night that drew mossy Sphinx moths buzzing like helicopters.

Purple hyacinth-beans cascaded our rafters.

By June, yellow and green zucchinis tripled overnight.

I discovered “National Give Your Neighbor a Squash Day”.

Orange marigolds and fragrant basil crowded bells, poblanos, mounds of colorful tiny chilis, banana (his favorite), and sweet Marconis (mine).

When I became pregnant that June, those peppers were my only craving.

Fall taught me to rub zinnias for seeds, crush aphids on milkweeds for monarch butterflies, and catch-release rattlesnakes at their watering hole.

My eighty-year-old parents gamely drove one thousand miles South, to see why I’d transformed my life.

Our wedding day was warm blue.

My spry mom gathered fuchsia peonies, white asters, and yellow black-eyed Susans to grace folding chairs.

Nodding at my bare feet, giant belly, and wildly-curling hair, she said, “This is right for you.”

Evenings my husband and I swung on the porch watching baby wrens, raised in our rafters, learn to fly between garden plots beneath the Milky Way.

My mom fell ill.

Now we drove one thousand miles north and south all winter.

I horrified my husband, devouring half-defrosted marconi peppers in his new truck.

When the daffodils pushed through again, my mom was gone.

Our baby girl was here, her middle name Violet for my mother.

Three years later marks the first spring in our own home.

The doublewide sits on a wooded hill.

We chainsawed trees, pulled Wait-a-Minutes for a garden.

The soil’s mostly chert.

I’ve an idea what to do.

The bulbs we planted in the fall (tulips, crocus, and, yes, daffodils) are rising.

As we mark their growth, I remind our daughter, “Never eat the daffodils.”

My husband grins, “But cook them for the man you want to marry.”

I meant to leave.

Instead, I planted roots.

My temporary stay became a life.

The dinner guest, my husband.

Some mistakes I hope my daughter never makes.

Others, I hope she’s brave enough to try – and, like my mother, I’m brave enough to let her.