All Good Things End

The daylily above is the last of this summer. The plant blooms once for several weeks and then it slowly begins to fade, leaves withering and dying.

My family knows I’m a flower nut. Each Mother’s Day weekend, we make the pilgrimage to buy all the annuals our SUV will hold. Then I spend the day filling pots with dirt, arranging what goes where, and loading our deck and yard with color. This year it took two days. Woe to any family member or storm cloud that seeks to keep this girl from her appointed weekend of beautifying. No teenager whining and pouting can match a Mom deprived of her time in May. My husband even built me three large brick flowerboxes to line our driveway, right against the house.

The blooms on a daylily last a single day. The next morning they are curled up, done. It’s easy to tell exactly how many days of bloom are left. Easy to count them by how many buds. The end came yesterday. Summer is moving on.

But this morning, I noticed something new. My butterfly bush had opened its first cluster of tiny white flowers to the world.