My grandfather had a dairy farm in rural Virginia, perched on a 30-foot sandy bank overlooking the wide Rappahannock River just as it nears the Chesapeake Bay. Some 50 years ago, he and my grandmother put up a “Rondette,” a two-bedroom prefab house, set back 50 feet from the bank.

From the Rondette, the view of the river and the two-mile-long bridge that crosses it was spectacular. The physics of the round design meant the house could withstand high winds—seemed like a safe choice for a coastal home. A few feet from the edge of the bank, my grandmother, who for reasons including illness never did much of anything physically demanding, planted some daffodils.

In the 50 years since, rising sea levels and the majestic storms that I loved to watch sweep across the river have ravaged the bank, pulling down trees and gobbling foot after foot of land until the Rondette had to be razed and carted away lest it litter the Rappahannock. I can gauge where it once was from looking at the 30-foot mimosa tree that I’d planted right behind the house when it was a spindly two-foot stick and I was a fifth-grader.

This spring, taking a break from the grief and exhaustion of clearing out my mother’s house after her death, I went for a walk on the beach. And there, just behind a piece of driftwood, were my grandmother’s daffodils, blooming brightly as they do every year. Beach daffodils.