The sunflowers will not stop.
In 2023, I planted a few different varieties of sunflower in my garden to see what would happen. I ended up with great towering blooms that I left to dry out until frost as a treat for the birds. The birds dropped seeds. The next year, and every year thereafter, I have had scores of free cross-pollenated sunflowers, growing out of the garden beds and the compost. Every year I transplant as many as I can instead of pulling them out like ordinary weeds. Every year, I get more flowers. Every year I try not to kill any, because they are so beautiful. I scooped a bucket of soil with six or seven seedlings in it for the lady who grows sunflower seeds for her chickens. I scooped three pots of seedlings for the newlyweds who just moved here and has never grown a garden before. I scooped a whole tray of seedlings to give to the Friendship Room, for their community garden. But there were still at least two dozen in my vegetable patch. I needed that space. I had lots of seeds to plant: including new sunflower varieties, to get some different colors among the yellow and red.
Last night, while Adrienne sat on the back porch doing homework, I transplanted the seedlings. I left the ones around the compost heap, but I moved the ones around the rose bush so they wouldn’t shade it and keep it from getting bigger. I planted some in the front planter which has a bit of sun now, because the landlord finally cut off several branches of the tree that grew too close to the porch and is coming back to finish the job this month. And then I gave up entirely and started pulling the sunflowers up like weeds.
I threw at least twenty perfectly good sunflower seedlings onto the compost heap, and wiped my hands, glad to be done with it.
I turned to other garden tasks as I helped Adrienne with homework: calling out the spellings of words, reminding how to cite in MLA style. I buried seed potatoes in a mixture of compost and organic potting soil. I ripped out crabgrass around the strawberry blossoms. I hammered 6-foot stakes in the ground to trellis the grape vine.
When I came around the side, between my house and the abandoned house next door, I saw an impossibility.
One of the dried sunflower heads I left out for the birds last year had tumbled off the side of the porch, into the grass between the houses. The seeds had spilled onto the soil. There were what looked like a hundred sunflower seedlings growing there, a little lawn of sunflowers instead of grass. I could just mow them, of course. I could rip them out and throw them in the compost with the others. But in that moment I had the idea to dig up a strip of soil on the edge of our property and transplant them as a living fence to block out the sight of the abandoned house next door.
In 2020, when I planted a big garden to help the neighborhood during the pandemic, my stalking neighbor rampaged on our property, tore up the vegetables, smeared her dog’s droppings on the porch, and beheaded my one budding sunflower. After that, as both her paranoia and her breast cancer spun out of control, she grew wilder and wilder, popping out of her house to threaten me whenever I went outside, assaulting Michael when he mowed the lawn, threatening more vandalism every time I tried to plant something, saying obscene things about Adrienne, ruining our holidays, menacing us with her dog, vandalizing everything she could get her hands on including the car. I tried to get a restraining order to keep my family safe, but that made it worse: the police washed their hands of it and kept insisting it was my word against hers. Next thing I knew, she took me to court and tried to frame me for trespassing. And then she died. Her place has been empty ever since. The wind chimes rusted into ruin on her porch, and the dandelions and wild blackberries in the backyard are up to my waist. I suppose whoever inherited the house will one day put it up for sale, but I sometimes hope it collapses into dust.
I’ve been recovering bit by bit ever since she died.
When the post-traumatic stress was at its worst, I was terrified to go outside. I couldn’t sleep through the night. I had panic attacks at the sound of a voice like hers or a dog’s chain rattling near the house. I am not completely well yet, and I suppose I never will be. But I am much better. I used to not be able to go a day without panic, and now I only panic every once in awhile. I used to have severe insomnia, and now it’s only moderate. I used to be so absentminded I couldn’t read a book, and last month I started reading Jane Austen, not just a page here and there but twenty pages a night. I’m volunteering at the church outreach. I’m going hiking with Adrienne and Jimmy’s boy. Just a few years ago all I wanted was to die, and now I’m learning to like my life.
Awhile ago I was talking to Jimmy the Mechanic about the stalking neighbor. He was one of the last people to talk to her before it was all over. She abused him too, but he managed to remain friendly to her because that’s how he is with everybody. She paid him to mow her lawn when she got too sick to push the mower, and he politely ignored it when she accused him of horrible things. He was the closest thing she had to a friend. He told me “yes, she hated everybody, because she hated her life. She had a terrible life and she just couldn’t get over it.” And I wasn’t exactly able to feel sad for her, but I did realize he was right. She could not overcome the blows life dealt her, so she turned around and tortured everybody else. And everybody else responded by shutting her out, and that often wasn’t the wrong answer. But it’s no less tragic.
So many times, when her abuse and my trauma were at the worst, I imagined her in hell. But just then, looking at the enormous crop of sunflowers growing at the edge of her property, I imagined her in purgatory– not a vindictive, torturous purgatory, but a purgatory where people sit with the consequences of their actions as they slowly learn to do better. So many times as I was recovering, I imagined her watching my garden from the afterlife, and wishing she could destroy it, and gulf between that world and this one preventing her. But just then, I thought of her reaching back from the afterlife to hand me a bumper crop of sunflowers, in repentance for the one she destroyed.
Where sin had once abounded, grace abounded all the more. I guess that verse is always true, but I’d never before seen it written in sunflowers.
I don’t know what I’ll do with the flowers, but I won’t make them into a fence.
Maybe I’ll just let them be.
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