One Day Only

Notes on impermanence

Jul 10, 2025

If you were to drive past my home in July, you’d be flanked on either side by a tempestuous sea of orange, purple, and green. Daylilies, clover, tall grass — wild, overgrown, lush. Nature doing its own thing.

They say daylilies1 bloom only for a day — one extravagant flare of color, then gone. But they never come alone. The plant keeps making buds, like a quiet garden relay. One flower hands off to the next. And the next. And the next. A bloom fades, and another is already waiting, ready to unfurl at dawn.

Two years ago was my first summer in the garden. I inherited the daylilies, plus some flowering trees and shrubs, like rhododendron, magnolia, lilac, and hydrangeas. In late May, I threw annual seeds down; some germinated, others didn’t. I didn’t know much about plants, but was resolved to learn through trial and error.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about growing a beautiful garden for its own sake. I was focused on what flowers I could cut and bring inside. I just couldn’t help myself. Pink cosmos, lime green zinnias, yellow sunflowers, lavender hydrangeas. I especially wanted those orange2 daylilies vased on my kitchen table, held up against the room’s smoky green walls. Even if only for a day.

My 4-year-old daughter Daisy helped me pick flowers that summer. She chose them, I cut them, she put them in the basket she would carry, we arranged them together. The daylilies were plentiful. We went to town on them. Daisy loved the color. She thought they looked like someone smiling while sticking out their tongue. I never saw it.

It took about a week of harvesting daylilies to learn a few important lessons.

Only cut the open flower. Leave the rest of the stalk intact if there are unopened buds still on it.
If you cut the stalk all the way down too early, you remove the chance for those future buds to bloom.
Once all the buds on a stalk have bloomed and withered, then you can cut the stalk back to the base — it won’t produce any more flowers.

So: enjoy the flowers, but don’t be greedy. Leave the buds. More blooms are coming.

There’s a photo of Daisy holding up daylilies, grinning like we’d stolen fire. She picked more than the garden should’ve allowed. And still, it bloomed. She’s wearing her gardening gloves: orange with rainbows. She once asked me why she had to wear gardening gloves, but I didn’t.

“It’s just safer,” I said.

“Then why don’t you wear them?”

“Because it’s okay if I get hurt.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m bigger, and have been hurt a lot. I can handle it.”

“Okay, mommy.”

“It’s good for me to feel the soil. To hold the earth in my hands.”

“But mommy, we live on Earth. We can’t hold the planet in our hands.”

Sometimes I think about what I would do if I had one more day with Daisy. Picking flowers and arranging them. Swimming. Collecting acorns. Playing dress-up. Creating worlds. Making her laugh. Watching her sleep. Holding her close.

The daylilies are back again this year. The same orange ones she loved best. Still blooming. Still smiling.

So am I. Somehow.

I don’t pick them anymore. I let them go wild. They bloom and fade, bloom and fade — and I try not to miss them before they’re gone.

🌸 WHAT’S BLOOMING & WHAT’S DYING? 🥀

Blooming: daylilies (did you not catch that?), cosmos, echinacea, lavender.

Dying: salvia, delphinium, the comforting lie that the universe is fair.

THE RASPBERRIES COMETH!

The black ones are especially delicious with vanilla ice cream.

🐓 BACKYARD DISPATCH

I regret to inform you that Chickolas Cage has been foxed.3

Paul came home on Saturday to a coop with only Hen Affleck inside. He suspected a hawk, I suspected a fox. We made a bet. The next morning, he looked around the yard and found, by the solar panels, a spectacle of stray, wet feathers: so it was a fox. (I’m always right btw.)

Hen Affleck roosted the following night for the first time since the fall. She usually sleeps in the small room inside the coop. Roosting could be a response to low-grade trauma. I'm keeping an eye on her.

Even before Chickolas perished, I knew it was time to throw some cock into the mix. My friend Kaitlyn has silkie chickens and I claimed one of the males. Silkies are fluffy, sweet-natured birds known for their soft, fur-like feathers, black skin, and tendency to act like tiny, goth Muppets with anxiety.

Feather Locklear joined our flock on Sunday afternoon. He is currently living in a dog carrier, because he’s young and we were concerned about Hen’s reaction to her new roommate. (Spoiler alert: she’s being an asshole.) He follows me around everywhere and loves to be held.

I think we need to get a couple more red hens to take the focus off of Feather. Also because I have an ever-growing Google doc of funny chicken names.

Rest in power, Chickolas. ✊ You and your double yolkers will be dearly missed.

🌱 SEEDLINGS OF HOPE

I have two patches of cosmos that have self-seeded: one by the bird feeder, one in the (currently overgrown) annual garden. Self-seeding is when a plant drops seeds and comes back the next year. Free seeds! I first noticed the small plants back in May while tackling the weeds. Young cosmos have ferny, delicate foliage and tall, bendy stems that look like they’re not entirely sure how gravity works. They remind me a bit of myself, really: scrappy, dreamy, slightly awkward, and effortlessly beautiful.

Anyway, big win! See below for photos. The first are the young plants that I discovered, then, the first blooms: pink is by the bird feeder, surrounded by sunflowers; orange is in the annual garden, surrounded by the field of weeds formerly known as the pumpkin patch.