Time stop passing

Lately all things seem to make me want time to pass. I hate the swampy heat of summer and pine for September. I have two weeks of vacation coming, but so importantly they are not yet here. I'm not sure if I've ever needed a vacation so bad. Work is in a tiresome phase with broken machines and hard work and bad news. A dense forest of green, forming tomatoes in my garden taunts me with the promise of a thriving flood of ripe fruit that remains tauntingly out of reach. Writing, I confess, is a sometimes struggle that, given time, will surely work itself out. Fruit fly invasions, mosquito season, play out their short, endless cycles. And all the house renovations that have claimed my wife and I are so nearly done, but so not done, and are most unbearable of all, I think, when they are in their last dregs.

Everything in me seems to cry out in a little agony; let time pass. Let just a little time pass.

But the tiger lilies are blooming.  

Right exactly now the tiger lilies are blooming.

These are by far the best flowers in our light starved yard. They grow on mad stalks with 20 heavy blooms that overwhelm their modest plants. Some topple over under the weight of humidity and all their massive flowers. Yesterday I cut one of these glorious, mythological creatures and put it in a glass on our small dining table. It slowly showers petals from its nine giant flowers. They are the color of the fruit of pale cantaloupes, but that won't describe it. Perhaps you have heard that bees can see into the ultra violet spectrum where humans cannot see? These flowers, these giant, pale cantaloupe flowers, with stamens fat full of vermilion pollen you can paint a house with, these flowers open the doors of our eyes and let us glimpse, nakedly, into the ultra violet spectrum that only bees can see. 

In simple daylight, if you'll just look for it, these flowers glow.

So to hell with time passing. I won't have it. Please let the lilies last a little longer. Turn up the heat and make it more humid. Leave me to work every hour and lock the doors. Postpone vacation and turn my writing sour. Cover me with bug bites, I can itch some more, and add a dozen chores to my groaning list. I need no sleep or tomatoes or an end to anything. 

Just give me another day of the lilies.