The Daylilies We Put Back on County C

The Sheet

Bonita took a piece of paper from the office and wrote across the top in marker: Frieda’s Lilies, Saturday, County C. Bring a spade and 40 divisions.

She tacked it to the break room board between the safety poster and the softball schedule.

I asked her why 40.

“Because I paced it off on my way in this morning,” she said. “That dead stretch is about a half mile. Frieda always planted them about two feet apart, single row, down the ditch side. That’s around 1,300 spots. Thirty people with 40 apiece gets you 1,200, and we fill in the rest next fall.”

That is Bonita. She does not just get mad. She gets out a pencil.

By the end of the day the sheet had 14 names. By Wednesday it had 22. By Friday morning it had 30, and three more people had written “can’t come but will send divisions” at the bottom.

It was not just the plant. Word got around the way it does out here, through the co-op and the church and the post office. People called me at home that I had never met.

A retired school bus driver called and asked if she could bring her husband’s post hole digger. I told her daylilies did not need that deep a hole. She said she was bringing it anyway, in case.

We agreed on the first Saturday in June. Daylilies can be moved almost any time the ground is not frozen, as long as you keep them watered. They might sulk a year, Frieda always said, but they would not die.

I asked Bonita whether the weed killer would still be in the ditch dirt.

She called her brother, who sells seed and chemical out of the co-op. He said from the look of it, Mitch had used glyphosate. It kills what it touches, but it does not stay active in the soil. You can plant right into it.

That was the first thing that went right.

Nobody Told

We had two rules. The first was that nobody told Frieda until that morning.

She would have said no. She would have said it was too much trouble, and that people had their own work, and that she did not want a fuss. And then she would have made us all coffee and cookies anyway.

The second rule was that nobody told Mitch.

That one was harder than it sounds. Mitch’s cows shipped milk to our plant. Half the people on that sheet saw his truck at the co-op every week. Anton picked up his milk every other day.

“You’re not going to say anything?” I asked Anton on Thursday night.

“I’m not going to say anything,” he said. “But I’m not going to lie to him either. If he asks me straight out, I’ll tell him.”

“Do you think he’ll ask?”

Anton shook his head. “Mitch doesn’t ask about anything but milk and weather right now. He’s got his head down. He’s just trying to keep the place.”

I knew that was true. It did not make me feel any softer about the ditch.