One of my favorite flowers -

         I like flowers and spend many hours working in my flower garden. Today while I was weeding and sweeping the bare soil at my favorite hangout, the old Folsom house yard downtown, I remembered a funny incident involving day lilies and how I got introduced to them.
         We had a piano teacher at our country school and each spring we had a piano recital and parents and friends all came to hear us play our selections we had memorized. The girls wore long "evening dresses" and this was a very special occasion.
        I think I was in the 6th or 7th grade the year some of us girls decided we needed to decorate the front of the stage where there were lights in a shallow well that provided a dim light for the stage. So we started looking around the school grounds during recess. We spotted some glossy green smilax (a vine) growing on a fence in the back of the school yard and kept that that in mind to place over the dim lights at the edge of the stage. Then we decided we needed some color.
Cousin' Maggie lived near the Curtis School and always had beautiful flowers. When we needed flowers for special occasions at school, she would let us come gather some. 
          We got permission from our teacher to walk to Cousin' Maggie's house to see if she had any flowers we could use for our recital. She was such a sweet lady. It was hot that afternoon so she didn't come outside with us; just told us to take whatever we needed. There were lots of flowers blooming but I spotted these beautiful orange "lilies" and suggested we gather some of those for our decorating. We had brought a pail of water with us to put the cut flowers in so they wouldn't wilt. After collecting what we thought was ample, we hurried back to school and placed the flowers in containers of water all along the "well" so that only the blooms were showing above the smilax vine.
          Our teacher came to the door of the auditorium and praised us for the beautiful decorations. Then the bell rang and we all got on the school buses and went home. I can still close my eyes and see those beautiful decorations. Around dusk, we came back to the school house, all decked out in our formal dresses and the boys wearing suits, and we filed up to the front of the auditorium to be seated. The auditorium lights were dimmed a bit for the program so we didn't have a full view of the flowers until we were near the front.
Then it happened!! I could not believe what I saw! Those beautiful orange blossoms had closed up and were not visible anymore. No one told us that they would do that at night. I'm surprised that I even remembered my piano selections because I was so distraught. I thought people would laugh at us. But you know what - after the recital people were talking about how nice the stage looked with the lights shining on the glossy green leaves of the smilax vine. Nobody said anything about the naked day lily stems sticking up with something on the end resembling a deflated balloon! I never see day lilies blooming that I don't remember this occurrence.
          By the way, we had a great piano teacher, Mrs. Mary Ringsdorf, whose husband was a dentist in Elba. She taught us all about the old masters and this is where I got my love for classical music (even though the tunes were called another name, like The Happy Farmer for Schubert's Serenade. And I think that we only had to pay 25 cents for a lesson. Since most of us didn't have a piano at home to practice, we took turns practicing on the piano at school during recess or during class when we finished our desk work early. I'm so thankful for having this musical experience in my early years. I never had any more music lessons, but I have always had a piano and play for my own enjoyment and I love going to concerts.