Stray Sunflowers

Late yesterday afternoon as I walked past the Zucchini patch on my way home my thoughts jumped around as fast as the grasshoppers on the dirt in front of me. It seemed like at the same time that I was gratefully thinking about my wonderful plight of being married to a farmer and living in such a quiet place I was looking at the zucchini and wondering how soon it would start harvesting and thinking that it'd be great to eat supper on the lawn. Pretty unrelated and random eh?
As I walked through the trees into our yard I suddenly spotted two beautiful dwarf sunflowers tucked in beside a bushel basket that I'd left laying on the rocks from weeding a rose bed at least a month ago. It seemed like they had literally popped up out of nowhere - in an instant. Intellectually I know it wasn't instant - because instant and plants dont really belong in the same wagon. It just seemed that way. Their brilliant and seemingly sudden appearance swerved my thinking to ponder their story as I went inside to chop onions and sweet potato greens for supper.

In late April of 2007 our daughter Kymbrelee, and son-in- law-to-be, Immian, decided that they wanted to have their July first wedding on our lawn. Our yard was just barely waking up after the last frost and according to the calendar we had about 67 days till the wedding. I grabbed the Johnnys catalogue and looked for fast color. Marigolds and Dwarf Sunflowers were among my top picks. I did an expedited order and we began planting. Thankfully, true to the genetic make up of the seeds - the yard was in full bloom ready for a romantic wedding by the evening of July one.

The sunflowers were incredible. The striking effect of hundreds of beaming sunflowers bordering our expansive green lawn was perfect. Their plump yellow faces were a bright contrast to the more delicate petunias and the splashy marigolds. But in spite of their tremendous impression on us that summer, I've never planted them again.

I am crazy about flowers. My therapy is to plant them, weed them, pick them, and spend quiet time in my yard so I can enjoy them and the gazoodles of butterflies and hummingbirds they attract. My flowers nourish my soul. But since the farm claims most of my time planting and tending my flowers has to fit in the left over cracks. So I choose flowers that will give me beauty for the longest time. Sadly, sunflowers do not meet those criteria. But in spite of the fact that I've never planted them again since that summer, every year I get a few persistant volunteers popping up here and there in our yard. And sometimes in the most unlikely places! Those two were growing in rocks on top of a weed barrier where there wasn't even regular irrigation! Perhaps a bird or the wind or both had dropped the seeds there where they lay dormant until one day the conditions must've been perfect for those two little seeds to germinate, grow and burst forth in those flamboyant blooms that fed my soul as I hurried into the kitchen to make supper for my hungry family.

It suddenly sobered me to realize the long lasting impact of the things that I allow into my mind. A scene from a movie, the lyrics to a song, a talk show host's comments, a magazine article, and much more are seeds getting tossed onto the soil of my mind. At some point given the right conditions they will spring up into more thoughts, words, or actions. The harvest will depend on the type of seed planted but it will happen.

That evening as we lingered around our weathered picnic table I sat back and basked in the glow of the tiki torches and the buzzing conversations of the bugs and of us. As our conversation bobbed from the health benefits of sweet potato greens to Bella's penchant for fresh juicy tomatoes to why opposites attract and whether or not that really works in marriage my mind strayed back to my musings on my way past the zucchini patch and how truly blessed I was to live on a farm and be constantly surrounded by the workings of nature and be immersed in wholesome hard farm work. It's the kind of life that leaves you so bone weary at the end of the day that quiet evening conversations with family and close friends are more exciting and meaningful than an amusement park or a thriller movie. It makes you learn to see gold in the dirt under your fingernails and in the inconvenience of getting drenched by a popped irrigation hose. And best of all, every day in almost every corner of the farm there are cause and effect lessons to learn about the deep things of life. The seriousness and depth of the lessons keeps a person grounded in the real things that make up the very substance of life. Today a couple of stray sunflowers were my teachers.




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