The Daylilies We Put Back on County C

The Ditch

We set her lawn chair right at the edge of the ditch, at the north end of the dead stretch, where she could see the whole row.

She sat down and pointed down the line like a foreman.

“Crown an inch under the dirt,” she called out. “Not more. You bury them too deep, they’ll sulk for three years. Fan of the leaves facing the road.”

Thirty people knelt down in the ditch grass and started to dig.

It was still damp from the dew. Within ten minutes my knees were soaked through my jeans. Nobody seemed to care.

We spaced out about two feet apart, the way Frieda always had. Some people dug and some people planted. A few of the men walked the row with five gallon pails of water from the back of a pickup tank and gave every new clump a drink.

Bonita worked right next to me. She had her sleeves rolled up and her gray hair tied in a kerchief.

“You know what I like about this?” she said, without looking up from her hole.

“What?”

“Not one single person here had to buy a thing. Every plant in this ditch already came from her.”

I had not thought of it that way until she said it. But it was true. We were not bringing Frieda new lilies. We were bringing her own lilies home.

The Names

That was when the tender part happened. I had not planned it. Neither had anybody else.

Gus came up to Frieda’s chair with his shoebox. It was full of popsicle sticks, the plain wooden kind, and he had a black marker in his shirt pocket.

“My mom said you might know what kinds they are,” he said. “I thought I could write it down.”

Frieda looked at him for a moment. Then she smiled, the first real smile I had seen on her face in a week.

“Bring me a clump,” she said.

Gus ran and took one out of my bucket and brought it to her. She held it up in the sun and turned it over in her hands. She looked at the leaves and the roots like she was reading a letter.

“That’s just a ditch lily,” she said. “The plain orange. That’s the one I started with, in 1984. Write ‘Frieda’s first.'”

Gus wrote it carefully on a stick, his tongue between his teeth. Then he ran back and pushed the stick in the dirt beside the clump I had just planted.

After that, he brought her one out of every bucket.

I did not think anybody could tell daylilies apart without the flowers. Frieda could. She knew them by the leaves, by the color of the roots, by which bucket they came out of and whose yard that bucket came from.

“That’s Rocket City,” she said, when Gus brought her one from Bonita’s bucket. “I gave that to your mother, Bonita, the spring after your dad’s surgery. She said she needed something bright to look at.”

Bonita stopped digging. She sat back on her heels in the ditch and did not say anything. Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and went back to work.

“That’s Mauna Loa,” Frieda said to the next one. “That one went to the parsonage in 1998. The pastor’s wife wanted something that bloomed early.”

Gus wrote it down.

“That’s Kwanso. The double one. My husband hated it. He said it looked like a tomato that exploded. But he planted it for me anyway, every fall.”

She laughed when she said it. Then she was quiet for a minute, holding that clump in her lap, and nobody rushed her.

Gus waited beside her chair with his marker, very patient for 11 years old.

Finally she handed it back to him. “Put that one by the culvert,” she said softly. “He’d have liked it there. He always stopped the truck by that culvert to look.”

I had to stop digging for a while after that. So did a few other people.

By nine o’clock there was a line of popsicle sticks running down the ditch, each one with a name in a boy’s careful printing. Frieda’s first. Rocket City. Mauna Loa. Kwanso. Ditch lily, from the feed mill. Ditch lily, from the post office lady.

Every one of them had a name. Every one of them had a story. Frieda knew them all.