Thoughts on flowers and immigration

This may be one of those times that I’m reaching a little bit too far. Please bear with me. I go out every morning to feed our various critters, and in June I always make a special trip up the driveway to see which new daylilies are blooming. Almost every day there is a new one, and it’s always my new favorite, at least until I get to my real favorite, a large, deep, solid yellow. All the two and three color ones, and even the doubles pale in comparison to that one. But that’s not where I’m going with this. We have daylilies from a variety of sources, all of them important to us for one reason or another. Some came with the place, and are old, traditional colors and blooms. I have been told that 60-70 years ago the driveway was lined with flowers, most of them irises, with lilies mixed in, and we’re trying to recreate that look, little by little. Some of them I brought with me. Of those, some were transplanted from my grandmother’s house in Mississippi to the house I grew up in, and then here. Others came as a gift from my mom. She bought huge clumps of them from a lady who was selling out. I had to bed them in the garden compost heap for a while, then move them to the flower beds in front of the house I lived in then, and finally to the spot they occupy now. Much traveled, but definitely worth all of the effort. A lot of them came from Dog Days, the local Monday morning flea market in Ardmore, TN. For a couple of years I would pick up my mom and we’d go there before I drove in to work. We shopped for everything, but I usually ended up with irises, then a few weeks later, daylilies. We very carefully wrote down each one’s name, and exclaimed over them all. So now they line the driveway, and there are bright splashes of color all along. But I’m horrible at organization, and worse at color matching, so they are randomly aligned, and I never know which one will be what color. And worse yet, I can’t tell you which came from what source. They all have a story, but the story lines are blurred, just like their names. And they all have found their rightful place, and they all are a part of the landscape. None of them failed to make it, and we sure didn’t send any of them home. It occurs to me that the situation I’ve created with them is in a tiny way the same thing this great country of ours has done with all of us on a much grander scale. We all came from different places at different times, each with a distinct identity. We proudly hold on to our heritage (Scotch-Irish, English, and some Cherokee in my case). But you know what? Line us up in a row, let us show our natural growth habit and colors, and we make the same kind of soul-pleasing splash of different/sameness that the flowers in our driveway make. No matter what our origin, religion, color, or size it seems as though we all find our place, get along with our neighbors, and make our contribution. It’s a great place to be. Too bad most of the members of the US House of Representatives can’t visit our driveway in the spring and early summer. It might give them some perspective they are missing.