The Sunflowers on Grandpa’s Twenty Acres

July

They started opening the last week of June. First a few on the edges, along the road, where the big ornamentals were. Then a few more every morning. Ben drove out every day before work, at five thirty, and called me from the gate.

“More today,” he would say. “Maybe a hundred more. They’re all facing east, Kylie. Every one of them.”

By the first Sunday in July, the whole field was open. Twenty acres of yellow as far as you could see, taller than a man, every face turned toward the sun. You could see it from a mile off coming down Route K. You could see it from Jim’s kitchen window.

We drove out after church. I had put on my yellow sundress and my boots. I don’t know why. It just seemed right. Sam was in his little shorts and sneakers, holding my hand so tight his fingers were white.

When we came over the last hill, I had to pull over.

There were cars parked along the blacktop, one behind another, half in the grass. Pickups and minivans and old sedans, with families climbing out of them. Grandmothers with walkers. Babies in carriers. Teenagers with phones.

They were walking through our pipe gate, one family at a time, and every one of them stopped at the edge of the field and just stood there.

Grandpa

Ben had brought Grandpa out earlier in the morning. He had insisted. He had told Ben he wanted a lawn chair set up right in the middle of the field, where he could see it all.

When Sam and I found him, he was sitting in a folding lawn chair in a little clearing Ben had cut in the middle of the sunflowers, with the stalks towering over him on every side, smiling like it was Christmas.

He had on a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. A brown tie with little tan diamonds on it.

I stopped walking. I knew that tie. Grandma had bought it for him at a department store in Jefferson City, forty years ago, for their anniversary. He had worn it exactly twice since she died. Once to her funeral, and once to walk me down the aisle.

“Grandpa,” I said. “Your tie.”

He looked down at it and smoothed it with his big, spotted hand.

“Well,” he said. “It seemed like a wedding sort of day.”

I had to turn away so Sam would not see me cry.

People found him there all afternoon. Word got around somehow that the old man in the middle of the field was the one whose land it had been. Families kept walking up to him, shy at first, and asking if they could take his picture.

He said yes to every one. A young couple with a baby. A family of five, all in matching red shirts. A grandmother with her grandson, who knelt beside his chair while the boy’s mother held up her phone. He smiled in every single picture.

“I never had my picture taken so much in my life,” he told me, around four. “Not even at my own wedding.”

“Are you tired?” I said. “Ben can take you home.”

“Tired?” he said. “Honey, I’m eighty-six years old. I’m going to be tired for the rest of my life. I’m not leaving.”