waiting

A couple of years ago, before my grandmother died, my parents came by my house bringing me a plastic bag she'd sent. Inside were the brown, knobby roots of irises and daylilies they'd dug up for me at her instruction. They looked awful. They were limp and wet from being in a plastic bag in my parents' hot car for days, and I didn't have much hope for them. Besides, I was busy with a thousand other projects at the time. So, as soon as my parents left, I made a shallow trench in an out-of-the-way flowerbed and dropped them in.

I thought about them from time to time, with something as near approaching regret as I could afford, but figured at least a couple of them might sprout and I'd put them...somewhere.

Do you know daylilies and irises? They're sturdy. The disdain of a busy woman is not enough to stifle them. So, the next spring, most of those roots just went ahead and grew plants.

There they are, still growing, now awfully overcrowded. I still don't pay much attention to them, until they burst forth with something beautiful, like the tissue-thin yellow iris that caught my eye one morning on the way out to feed the chickens. There it was, like a gift, the plant holding it out as if to say, "Remember us?"

I dug those up and planted them around the wellhouse. Now they add a splash of spring color there. They had been brown, ugly...I hadn't known they'd have those fragile petals that glowed in the sunrise. Later, in the summer, this beautiful, double orange daylily shows itself. I think I know the perfect place for it, a place that looks lonely and could use something this happy.

Every time I dig up one of her flowers, I think of my grandmother. I think of the parents of these plants that are still growing on her farm in South Carolina. Where will the children of these plants go? Will they always stay here on my farm? Or will someone dig them to take away to the garden of one of my daughters or granddaughters, to plant in some disused corner, where they can slowly, gently, quietly, beautifully, teach her lessons about life?

Comments

[Wendy Artman]

This reminds me of the daylilies we transplanted from my grandparent's house after they died. We aslo transplanted all of my grandmother's old fashioned rose bushes---what I would give for one of those in my yard!!