The Daylilies We Put Back on County C

July

The lilies sulked, like Frieda said they would. Most of the new clumps did not bloom that first summer. They put out green leaves and rooted in and saved their strength.

But a few of them did bloom, about the second week of July. Here and there down that half mile, a little orange flag of a flower would stand up among the green, right beside its popsicle stick.

The first of the new clumps to open was the Kwanso by the culvert. The double orange one, the one her husband said looked like an exploded tomato.

Frieda saw it from her porch swing. She walked down the drive with her cane, all the way to the road, and stood there looking at it for a long time.

I watched her from my yard. I did not go over. Some things a person ought to get to look at by herself.

The next summer, all of them bloomed. Three miles of orange along County C again, from the township line down to the creek bridge, with only a slightly thinner stretch in the middle where the young ones were still filling in.

People drove out from Monroe on Sunday afternoons to see it, the same as always. Gus’s popsicle sticks were faded and crooked by then, but most of them were still there, and people stopped to read them.

The Boom

I still drive County C every morning to my six o’clock shift. I still pass that half mile, and the little orange flags by every post.

Every spring and every summer, I see Mitch’s sprayer go by on the road. And every single pass, when he comes to the start of that half mile, he stops the tractor.

He folds his outer boom sections up, the ones that swing out over the ditch. He sprays that half mile of field edge with the short boom, slow, the way it takes twice as long.

Then at the other end, by the curve before my place, he stops again and unfolds them.

He has never missed. Not once. Not one pass in two years.

Anton says it probably costs him an extra twenty minutes every time. He says Mitch has never said one word about it at the co-op, which is how you know he means it.

Frieda is 89 now. She does not get down into the ditch anymore. But every fall, Mitch comes over with a spade and digs the old clumps by her mailbox, and she sits in her lawn chair in her red cardigan and tells him how deep.

Last fall, he brought Gus along to learn.

I sat on my back step and watched the three of them out there by the road, the old woman and the farmer and the boy, splitting lilies in the sun. The lilies beside my step had grown back thick, just like Anton said they would.

That is the thing about daylilies. You can kill them down to the dirt, and if somebody cares enough to put them back, they will come back every July for the rest of your life.