Inspired by Sunflowers in Vase by Jane Manco
Rachel Jackson
After the last snowflake melts, after the first raindrops fall from the awakening skies, after the thawing soil is tilled for planting, when the vernal sun breaks over the eastern horizon, a certain field of sunflowers begins its annual bloom, and Dolores begins watching from the farmhouse next door to see which sunflower will reach maturity first each year – it is that flower upon whose stem she will tie her daughter’s white hair ribbon, the one she wore on her quinceañera. It is no longer Dolores’s family’s field of sunflowers – she sold the land years ago, after the accident – but the owners permit her to walk through the field as she pleases, as she must. It is her ritual. When from her east-facing window she sees the first glint of yellow emerging shyly from behind its leaves to greet and follow the shining sun, she walks purposefully, reverently, toward it, her annual journey underway. Weaving through rows of green leaves, she nears it, a folded little thing with hesitant petals bent inward on themselves, not yet a mature, dignified sunflower but painted enough with a tinge of vibrant yellow to cause a sting of tears to form at the back of Dolores’s eyes.
Yellow was Mariposa’s favorite color. The blooming of the sunflower field every summer was a homecoming for her, enraptured as she was by the feeling of warm sunshine on her face, cool dirt between her toes, and the subtle earthy scent of growth all around her – every year in the field she grew stronger, ran faster, reached higher. She was drawn to the field as butterflies are to nectar. Her first steps as a baby were taken near the field, her mother told her often, painting a vivid verbal picture of little Mariposa in bare feet wobbling unsteadily at first, holding onto her mother’s pinky finger until Dolores slowly pulled her hand away and Mariposa tottered joyfully along on her own. Her last steps, fourteen years later, were taken at the edge of the field too, disregarded and disavowed by a careless driver who was less desirous of the presence of sunflowers as he was of chasing a different intoxicating high. Sunflowers were the bookends of her life. The first sunflower of the season is always for her. A month after the flower appears, Dolores carries shears into the field, walking this time into a EKPHRASIS 2022 | 21
