My Grandmother's Garden

A reminder of the small, temporary beauties that make life meaningful.

In the late days of her life, my grandma spent most of her time in bed next to a sliding glass door that overlooked her backyard. It was an oasis for wildlife even in the suburbs of Chicago, visited frequently by foxes and ducks, by cardinals and rabbits, by eager chipmunks with their pregnant cheeks, by a proud hawk that often bathed in her turquoise pool.

Outside the kitchen window was a hefty maple, one my grandpa had planted some fifty years before. There were birdfeeders and squirrel-feeders, rust-red brick footpaths, green-leaved vines, full-bloomed flowers in pink and gold. And next to the glass door where my grandma spent her time, a small surprise cluster of daylilies growing up from the eroded space between a stone step and the side of her house. No one had planted them there. They just were.

Daylilies flower for only a day. They open around dawn, yawning and stretching, turning their faces toward the sun, and they live in radiance for one glorious day before withering as night comes. The next morning, the daylily admired the day before is gone, but a new one is blooming in its stead. My grandma loved her daylilies, waking daily with an eagerness to see what might have bloomed as she slept.

When I was contemplating the purpose of this newsletter, I kept finding myself back in that room, beside my grandmother, beside the daylilies, four months pregnant, wondering at the ordinary splendor of a home, of a life tended to with care. She was a painter and so those memories are full of delicious color—brown butter hardwood, raspberry blankets, a summer squash sofa, spinach and berry garden, sweet potato and cardamom, an asparagus swing and a blue moon pool. These memories fill me up, and, grief-dense as they were, leave me too with hunger.

I have hungered much lately. I have spent a lot of time with longing. “But then, that’s what grief is,” Katherine May wrote in Wintering, “a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.” And here I am, yearning; yearning for my grandmother, for her house, her stove, her trees, for the hues and the warmth and the kindness, for who I was in relationship to her, a version of myself who passed away when she did; I am waxing nostalgic too for airplanes, for coffee shops and movie theaters, for date nights and museums, for a certain type of fearlessness I don’t have anymore; for the birds we had back in Nashville, for Shabbat prayers made in community, for friends I don’t see anymore. The landscape of our lives has irrevocably changed, and it takes a long looking-back to remember what it felt like to be myself then.

And for all this change, isn’t it strangely monotonous, redundant? For a new year, the clock seems stalled, stuck, belt loop caught on a knob. Time is a heavy old accordion. And here we are, trying to stay here, present, while the same song drones on and on and on and on and…

And I think of my grandma, 85 years behind her, waking in the same place each day for all the days she had left. And I think of her delight. She loved to have guests in her garden, simple and wild, as woodland life is. I think especially of the daylilies, of her keenness to welcome a new flower each morning, though it meant yesterday’s had died. Identical though it may be to the one that came before, it’s here, and it’s new, and it’s lovely, and with it blossoms attention, meaning, contentment.

So this is The Daylily—a reminder of the small, temporary beauties that make life meaningful.

The Daylily is a twice-monthly newsletter, but I hope it will inspire each of us to find daily ways to connect to the provisional sources of awe that surround us. I hope it will inspire each of us to learn, to be curious, to notice what is in front of us today and to let ourselves be changed by it, if only for a moment. And I hope we can do this work together, educating and heartening one another as we learn what it looks like to seek symbols of contentment around us, whether we are yearning or settled, mudstuck or moving.

I am really looking forward to residing in this new space with y’all. You can expect poetry, reflections, and writing prompts (plus occasional news and sales) in your inbox twice monthly. All of this is free, forever. For anyone who wants to go a little deeper, I have also launched a paid-subscriber option—this is where I’ll open a once-monthly thread where we can get a little more collaborative (i.e. sharing your own poetry, reflections and responses to writing prompts, or moments of contentment, grief, need, awe). I’ve kept it low-cost, as I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible, but if finances are a barrier for you and you want to be a part of things, please let me know and we will work something out. You can subscribe to that right here :)

And just to get things started, here’s a little something to write about
(this is for you—write as much or as little as you want):

Looking back, what have been your daylilies?
What have they meant to you? How have they changed you?

Wishing you warmth from a quite-blizzardy Michigan,

torri