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Sunflowers in The Garden
When I was young, we always had sunflowers in our garden |
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The seed that became Daddy's flower was the tallest, and the rest seemed to follow the pattern of our family. When Jimmy stepped on a nail, a few leaves on his plant turned brown. Daddy laughed at our theory, but the brown leaves weren't there earlier that day.
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It happened like a ceremony, we called it a "planting." Sometime beteen late April and mid-May as the sun coaxed our lawn from brown to green and shoes became less necessary, we'd get the family together for an evening alongside the fence. Daddy would bring rakes still caked in last year's mud and old shovels with frowning tips. Momma carried various buckets- one for a medley of seeds, one for "nourishment," and one for the few "plants already growing there" we'd be removing.
Plants we'd remove were referred to as "useful, but unimportant." Never once did I hear my parents call them weeds. Only later in the year would we guess why they grew just fine without water, while the "useful, important" plants withered. Those hardy plants were useful, my parents said, because they grew- and were possibly unimportant for the same reason.
Our planting proceeded in uniform fashion. We'd turn the soil over not just once, but until hands turned red and began to blister. The ground became so airy that to step on it was to lose sight of your foot- and Daddy's patience, as well. Occasionally, one or more of my siblings would daringly dart across the fertile bed when he'd turn away. Stepping in it made you feel weightless- as though you could fall backwards and make as angel like we'd done so many times in the winter snow. A shouted, "Kids!" would always bring us back to planting.
A few quick maneuvers with the rake and our rows were initially hoed. Daddy had a way of moving this way and that, then stepping aside to show us an even, consistent row that traverses the length of our fence. A neat groove lined the top of each row. Once finished, he'd hand the rake to Momma, who would then open each seed packet by making a small tear in one end. She positioned each shaken-out-seed "just so" in the shallow trough, then covered it lightly with loam. We'd anxiously watch until called upon to assist with easy seeds like onions and beets.
 Any leftover space was offered to the children, who could plant what they wished. Two or three years earlier, we'd impatiently planted a hodgepodge of the seed left in the bottom of the bucket-seeds Momma called "magical." We were anxious to see what would grow. Only in August could we tell the Hubbard squash from the pumpkins. With diligent watering, we succeeded is raising a pumpkin that had to be moved in our wagon, and a squash that could be split only with an ax. From them on, we'd scrape any magical leftover together once all the little packets were gone, then broadcast these seeds in our corner spot and await nature's outcome.
We'd fill a bucket many times to water the seeds. We'd trickle liquid here and there, then walk up and down between the rows to compact dirt that would become even more compressed as the season wore on.
The day's crowning event was the planting of our family jewels. We'd taken from the previous year's harvest a handful of 50 or so sunflower seeds. We fingered them individually from a small plastic bag, and embedded them evenly in the space that remained along the fence. A seed was placed on the tip of a finger, then pushed deep in the ground was all it took.
And that is where the real garden grew.
It wasn't until I was almost twenty that I put the entire puzzle together. One year, as my voice was just beginning to crack, our sunflower sowing had an uncommon reaping. Regardless of the number of sunflower seeds that we planted that year, only five-one plant for each family member- grew into a full-sized sunflower. Many would grow much shorter, non-flowering versions of this plant called sunflower, but only four, then mysteriously, five grew to maturity. It was never clear why this happened. It was an unexplained phenomenon that paralleled and perhaps shaped our lives-at least for the season.
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By Brett Walker, LDS Living Magazine May/June
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