Story and Photos by Dean Worbois

My mother had a way with plants, and her flowers were a summer-long frenzy of color.

She always planted daylilies, their long stems holding up orange clumps of color to the height of car windows passing by the southwestern corner of our Boise property. This was one-half of a block of land my folks bought in 1947, when I was two. The block was a garden and cow pasture owned by a Mr. Quarbridge, who had never developed it. My parents not only built a home on it where my two sisters and I were raised, but also established a tractor and trailer rental business there. Accordingly, the structure they erected was a long half-home half-garage, set back from the road and surrounded by borrow pits, from which dirt had been “borrowed” to build the unpaved streets.  We were close to town, yet outside the city’s regulations on businesses in residential neighborhoods.