Sunflowers

I had been anticipating the blooming. The blooming of the tallest sunflower outside my dining-room-turned-pandemic-office window. Anticipating it in the way others anticipate the birth of a child. When I tilled the ground and planted seeds and hoped they would sprout into the tallest, jack in the beanstalkiest of sunflowers ever, I was crying. Crying because digging in the earth, which I never do, reminded me that Evan is not physically with me. And that his body is burned to ashes in the urn that rests near the window in the sitting-room-turned-pandemic storage space.

After my little cousin died, my aunt created a garden to memorialize her...to remember her in a beautiful light. Aunt Peggy suggested maybe I should do the same for Evan. The first summer after Evan I didn't do it. I bought the seeds, but never planted them. 

It's now the second summer after Evan and I finally took those seeds and put them in the ground. Most mornings when I wake up the first thing I do is go and look at the sunflower plants. First I watched them sprout and realized they were too close togther and I'd need to thin the sprouts. And the act of thinning the sprouts felt like I was killing potential. To make myself feel less guilty, I pulled up the sprouts, sprinkled them in my salad and ate them. At least, I thought, they'll nourish my body. They'll transform energy and help me grow.

As they got taller, I chatted with them. Really, I was cheerleading and telling them, "You're gonna grow really tall and beautiful! You're doing such a good job. Keep it up, sunflowers!"

I put some other flowers in the earth but it's the sunflowers I visit and water and weed and clip dead leaves from.  Why? One summer when Ev was about five years old, a man who had been a farmer and who lived in Kettering right across from the Presbyterian church, the church where I now sit in a circle with other bereaved parents-- this farmer had a nice big yard. Every summer he'd plant rows and rows of sunflowers and when the plants were eight to 12 inches high, the farmer would thin the extra plants and offer them to anybody who stopped by his house. I didn't know this man but we saw his little, handwritten sign, Free Sunflowers. I said we should get one or two or three. How many do you want? Three, Evan replied. 

Now mind you, we lived in a townhouse so we had no yard. The only place we could plant the sunflowers was a patch of sandy dirt over by the metal garbage dumpster. It had a wooden frame around the patch of dirt and looked like an unusual place for a patch of dirt. So we went over there. Dug three holes and put the sunflowers in each. The earth was very sandy The dirt was basically sand and later the custodial staff  told me it used to be sandbox with a springy metal horse in the middle. But now it was onion grass and our three sunflowers. 

We carried buckets of water to the flowers almost every day, but only one plant survived. I'm not sure if we overwatered them underwatered, or they just couldn't stand the transplant, but only the one survived.