Sam & the Daffodil

Sam loooooves the outdoors and will happily abandon his piles of inside toys for sticks, rocks, and dirt. We have a few daffodils that came up in our neglected flower beds. The soil and erosion are so bad that only one of the daffodil clumps managed a single bright yellow flower. I watched it for days doing its joyful trumpet solo amid the desolation of exposed tree roots and red clay. Then a few days ago while I was distracted on the phone, I noticed that Sam had managed to climb up into the flower bed and was picking at the petals of the doomed bloom. Before I could stop him, he had squashed it in his fat fist. Then he shook it off his palm like sticky corn and, oblivious to my wails, stomped the petals soundly into the dirt. Sometimes he still returns to that clump of daffodil shoots to think about what he found there, and how fun it was to wreck it.