The Sunflowers on Grandpa’s Twenty Acres

Why We Never Called Anyone

People asked me afterward why we did not just call somebody. The sheriff, the county, a lawyer, anyone. Some of them thought we had been soft.

But calling anybody on Ben’s own sister over horses would have ended Sunday dinners for good. Those horses were never hurt or hungry. It was our land, and we just needed it back. That was all.

So we waited. We thought she would call in a week and say yes, or say she had found a place. Instead, three weeks later, she stood up at Easter dinner and said what she said.

The Kitchen Table

The Tuesday after Easter, I drove out to my grandpa’s farm after school. He still lived in the white farmhouse with the green shutters, alone since Grandma passed, with a woman from church who came three mornings a week to help.

He was in his recliner by the window with the farm report on the radio. He was eighty-six now. His hair had gone completely white, and he moved slower than he used to, but his mind was as sharp as ever.

I sat down at his kitchen table and told him everything. The horses. The two years. The fence and the hay. What Ben asked. What Tiffany said at Easter, in front of fourteen people and a nine-year-old girl.

He listened without interrupting. When I was done, he took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt.

“What do you want to do with it?” he said.

“With what?”

“The ground,” he said. “Not the horses. Not Tiffany. The ground. What did you want it for?”

I had to think about that. Nobody had asked me in two years.

“A house, someday,” I said. “But not yet. Not for a long time. Mostly I wanted it to be something good. The way you meant it. I wanted it to be a gift.”

He nodded. He looked out the window at his own fields, going green with winter wheat, for a long time.

“Your grandma planted sunflowers along the garden fence every summer,” he said. “Every year we were married. She said a sunflower can’t help but make a person smile. I used to tease her that they were for the birds.”

He smiled a little at that.

“You know what I’d do,” he said. “But it’s your ground. It’s not mine anymore.”

I drove home that night and told Ben. He listened the way Grandpa would have, all the way to the end. Then he laughed, the first time I had heard him laugh since Easter.

“Twenty acres,” he said. “Of sunflowers.”

“Twenty acres,” I said.

“Kylie, do you know how much seed that is?”

“No,” I said. “But you’re about to find out.”