I was coming home from a meeting tonight when I saw it, the second night in a row that I have, from the same stem: a daylily. After nine pm.
A well-established daylily cluster can produce hundreds of blossoms to make up for how very short the life of each. This plant was just over a year old, planted when the street was redone and re-landscaped; it’s a young one.
It was shooting its one long stem stretched out far to the side and up, as if it were reaching with all its might, up towards the streetlight, which seemed to spotlight it directly. Daylily flowers typically falter and shrivel at the first hint of dusk (and this is October!), but it must have found what it needed, the streetlight must somehow have produced enough energy to light the dark away: the yellow flower was in full bloom and full color in spite of the night. It was very striking.
I got home, marveling over that, to where my husband was watching the BBC news live. Where the third trapped miner in Chile, after 69 days underground, walked out of the rescue capsule and into the arms of his wife and the whole wide waiting world, in night lit up like the day.