patrickmurfin

 HIGH SUMMER

The day lilies—

            you know the ones,

                        crowding corner patch  

                        across from the Church,

            leaning into the morning sun,

                        yearning nestlings,

                        orange maws wide,

                        insisting on that next fat worm.

 --Patrick Murfin

I first posted a slightly different version of this poem on my blog about this time two years ago.  Well, their back just as I remember them.  Probably even lusher this year.  Back when I wrote the poem McHenry County was in the grips of the third year of a prolonged drought.  The talk of the county was the shrinking aquifer.  Farmers fretted for their corn and soybeans.  Lawns were brown and even flower gardens faded, dusty, and a tad shabby.  Those tall day lillies looked even more heroic in that context.

It’s different this year.  The words are verdant and lush.  The drout was finally broken by torrential rains and flooding last August followed by a near record year of snow fall over the winter and a soggy spring.  We were not immune around here from the historic rains which flooded much of the Midwest.  Our localized flooding along the Fox River and low point ponding was a nuisance.  We fared better than Iowa or the Missouri River towns.  The flooded farm fields have dried out enough for the corn to come along quite nicely, thank you, on target for “knee high by the Fourth of July..”  And local farmers are counting the profits in their head with thought of bringing their bumper crop to a market starving for grain.  The price may even be high enough to offeset all of the soaring fuel and fertilizer costs.

Woodstock, where I work,  has never looked better.  Lawns are deep green.  Trees spread their generous canopies arching over the streets.  Gardens dazzle.  Those day lillies are taller than ever.

The astonishing beauty of this mid-summer does a lot to raise the gloom of the world going-to-hell-in-a-hand=basket.  Let us cherish this moment of serenity, however delussional.

This Tri-Colored Beech was planted by at the Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock as a memorial for four  girls and young women of the congregation who have died in the past few years.  The moving dedication service was last Sunday.  The tree replaces a beloved old flowering cherry tree whose bifurcated trunk collapsed last year.  Landscaper extradinary Bruce Weiss planted a garden surrounding the new tree to be at its height for the dedication service.  It’s an example of the extraodinary flowers so abundant this year.