The Daylilies We Put Back on County C

The Porch

After my shift that day, I did not go home. I parked in Frieda’s drive and walked up to her porch.

She was sitting in the swing with her hands in her lap. She had on her red cardigan, the one she wears every morning until the sun gets high, and she was looking down the road at the brown.

She did not get up when she saw me. That was how I knew it was bad. Frieda always gets up.

“You saw,” she said.

“I saw,” I said. I sat down on the step below her. “Frieda, was it Mitch?”

She nodded. “He stopped by Wednesday. He said he was going to clean up the ditch along his fields. I thought he meant mow it.”

“He didn’t mow it.”

“No,” she said. “He didn’t.”

I could feel the anger coming up in me. My face got hot. I said, “That’s the county right of way. He can’t just spray it. I’ll call the highway department tomorrow.”

Frieda put her hand on my shoulder. Her hand was light and dry, like a leaf.

“No,” she said. “You won’t.”

“Frieda, he killed half a mile of your lilies.”

“He’s my husband’s brother’s boy,” she said. “He’s the only Ruegsegger left on this road. I am not going to fight family over flowers, Heidi. Not at my age. Promise me you won’t call anybody.”

I did not want to promise. But she kept her hand on my shoulder until I said it.

Then she looked back down the road. “I’m too old to start over,” she said quietly. “I don’t have 40 more years.”

That was the line that went through me. Not the anger. That.

I went home and sat on my back step and looked at the 40 clumps of her lilies beside my door. A few of the early ones already had an orange flower open.

My husband, Anton, came in from his milk route around four. He drives a bulk truck for the cheese plant, picking up from about a dozen farms a day, Mitch’s among them.

He sat down next to me. “I saw the ditch,” he said.

“Frieda won’t let me call the county.”

He was quiet for a while. Anton is a quiet man. He thinks before he talks, which is more than I can say for me.

“Calling the county won’t put a single lily back,” he said finally. “Even if they made him pay a fine, that ditch would still be brown.”

He was right. I hate it when he is right, but he usually is.

“So what do we do?”

He nodded at the lilies by the step. “How many of those are hers?”

“All of them.”

“Well,” he said. “There’s a start.”

The Break Room

The next morning at work I could not stop thinking about it. I run quality tests at the plant. I test the milk when it comes in, and I test the curd and the cheese all the way through.

It is careful work. You cannot rush it, and you cannot make a mistake. I kept catching myself staring at the same sample for a full minute without seeing it.

At morning break, I sat down across from Bonita Kubly. Bonita is 60 years old and has worked in the make room for 31 years. She knows every farm, every family and every story in this end of the county.

“You look like somebody ran over your dog,” she said.

So I told her. I told her about the ditch and the porch and what Frieda said about not having 40 more years.

Bonita set down her coffee cup. She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, “Frieda gave my mother lilies in 1991. They’re still along my garage. I split them myself every few years.”

“Mine are hers too,” I said.

Bonita looked around the break room. There were maybe 15 women sitting at the long tables, eating sandwiches and checking the clock.

“I’d bet you a dollar half the women in this room have Frieda’s lilies in their yard,” she said.

She was not wrong. She stood up right there and asked them.

“Who here has orange daylilies that came from Frieda Ruegsegger out on County C?”

Eleven hands went up. Eleven out of 15.

One woman from packaging said she had about 60 clumps along her fence. Another said her mother had so many she had to give them away at the church rummage sale.

Bonita turned back to me. “Well,” she said. “There you go.”