This wasn’t always the case. A few weeks ago, I stood in the Big Lots gardening aisle and held two bulb boxes in my hands. Day lily bulbs were on sale for only $2. Which should I choose? Pink or orange. The answer seemed so obvious. I left the store with an orange bulb, ready to plant it in an empty green pot immediately when I got home.

A few weeks ago, I was amazed to watch the first flower come to life in our yard. Since we moved here in winter, we didn’t know that the homeowners had planted flowers up the bank on the side of our house. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the orange lily pop open. I spent that day and the next few days taking pictures of these orange lilies. I was so excited to see flowers. I guess I’d never realized that Milledgeville was too hot for flowers like these. Even though they aren’t mine, I thought it was good practice taking these pictures for when my own container plants eventually have their first blooms.

But apparently orange lilies aren’t anything special. They keep showing up, day after day after day. I see them everywhere. Out our windows. In our side yard. In our backyard. Peeking out of our ravine. In the ivy at our driveway’s end. Across the street. In every house’s yard. In front of businesses. In the grassy median on the way to Walmart. Everywhere.

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As a freshman/sophomore in college and environmental science major, I always kept plants in my dorm room. I admired my lab partner Dustin’s super green dorm room that overflowed with plants. He gave me several “spider plant babies”, which I kept in the tiniest of pots. Plastic cups. Those plastic lids from empty CD dispensers. I loved keeping these guys alive on my window sill. I loved anything alive in my dorm room, which is why I ended up with several tanks of betas, rescued an aquarium of deformed guppies, and even brought Mudd the hamster into the picture (though he was evicted after three months by a lamo RA).

After changing my major and moving out of the dorms and into a real house, I lost all of the fish to age or accident, and Mudd escaped to live wildly in the walls. The plants stayed around until I adopted Bogie the cat, who will eat anything grassy and green. I tried putting plants on top of the refrigerator, but they died without access to sufficient light. In my next house, I kept a fern in the empty fireplace (where it was chewed on a lot before it died), and a few plants on hooks on the porch outside (which got too cold and died). I tried to keep “fridge plants” again in Flagstaff, but, again, they died. Plants on hooks on our Georgia porch didn’t work out too well either (they burnt out before the winter, when they… you know). I missed plants around the house, but between school, cross-country moves, and a crazy cat, they weren’t a priority. I couldn’t justify keeping them around, and the constant cycle of death depressed me.

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