The Happiest Flower, Slightly Sad: Lily of the Valley

March 29, 2026

| THE EPISTOLARIAN |

Yesterday, my sister and I listened to a compilation of nineties country music, and instantly I was no longer in the present. I was again a passenger in my family’s blue and white Suburban. It was 1996, somewhere along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, the light coming in wide and unbroken as KBUL 98.1 hummed low through the speakers.

I turned, as I used to, toward the side-view mirror and caught my ten-year-old reflection. I was wearing gas-station sunglasses, slightly too large, the tint a soft brown that made everything look warmer than it was. My hair lifted and fell in the wind, crossing my face and then leaving it again. I remember holding still, finding the angle that felt most beautiful, and staying there as long as I could.

After a while, I turned and looked out at the telephone wires running alongside the road, rising and falling in long, even arcs. I put my hand out the window and let it surf those waves, lifting and dipping in the air, trying to match their rhythm, feeling for the interstice between them.

On the radio, Reba McEntire sang, or maybe it was Patty Loveless. Their voices filled the car without seeming loud. They belonged there. The men followed, Vince Gill, Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn. And then Randy Travis, whose voice even now seems unchanged by time. “Forever and ever, amen,” he sang, and someone, maybe my sister, leaned forward and turned the volume slightly higher, not enough to remark on.

Listening again, the songs changed every ten seconds. Still, we knew every word. Not only the ones we loved, but the others too, the ones that leaned too far into their promises. “I swear, by the moon and the stars in the sky.” We sang those as well, without irony. There had been no way to skip them. The radio moved forward on its own, and we went with it.

What I remember most is how one song gave way to another. A voice would rise, fill the space, and then it would be gone, replaced before you had time to consider it. There was no effort to hold on to what you liked, and no way to refuse what came next. You listened. The music settled somewhere deeper than conscious memory. It passed.

There is a flower that carries this idea with it, Lily of the Valley. It is often said to symbolize happiness, though more precisely it marks its return. Its small white bells bow toward the earth, as if shaped by what has passed and the interstice between one happiness and the next.

The radio understood this, in its way. It did not offer only what we liked. It offered what came next.

I think of that now when I remember the Suburban, the wide mirror, the voices arriving and leaving in their turn. Somewhere, the signal from that summer is still traveling outward, now nearly thirty light-years away, deep in the dark of space. And within it, the sky remains as it was, the wind lifting through the open window, a girl holding still in the brief, exact moment she believed she had found herself, and would again.

A Letter Exercise

Write about a moment of happiness you return to. What did it taste like, sound like, feel like?

When I think of Lily of the valley, I notice the way its small bells bow toward the earth. A return to happiness suggests something has passed.

What does your return remember?

Lilies of The Valley

There are two very popular Lilies of the Valley in the Hastings Collection. The first is the large format Lily of the Valley Floriography Seal. It is beautiful on it's own, but especially with the two-tone method (which you can learn here).

Lily of the Valley Floriography Seal