The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

By Thursday morning every one of them had gone yellow. Wyatt found them first, the way he found everything first that summer, because he was out the back door before I had the coffee poured.

I heard the screen door slap and then I didn’t hear anything at all. With an 8-year-old boy, quiet is the sound that makes you set the pot down and go look.

He was standing at the fence line in his pajama pants with the coffee can in one hand. The can was full. He had carried the water all the way out there before he saw.

Sixty sunflower plants, knee high on him the Saturday before, were folded over at the middle like somebody had let the air out of them. The leaves had gone the color of old newspaper.

I walked out in my house shoes through the wet grass. I knew what it was before I got there. I’d been a farm wife before I was ever a school nurse, and I know what spray does.

“Grandma,” he said. “Did they get too much water?”

That was the first thing he thought. That it was his fault. That he had loved them too hard with that coffee can and drowned them.

“No, honey,” I said. “You didn’t do this. You watered them just right.”

He looked down the row, all sixty of them, and then he looked back at me. He has a gap in the front where both his top teeth came out in April, and when he’s trying not to cry he presses his tongue into it.

He was pressing his tongue into it now.

“Can we fix them?”

I knelt down in the grass, which at 70 is a decision you make on purpose. I took one of the plants between my fingers. The stem was soft. There was nothing to fix.

“No, baby,” I said. “These ones are done.”

He didn’t slam the door. That was the worst part. A boy who slams the door is mad. A boy who closes it gently has decided not to want things anymore.

I stayed out there a minute with my hand on the wire. On the other side of the fence, Merle Hatch’s ground ran clean and bare for about three feet before his alfalfa started. Not a weed. Not a blade of grass.

And on our side, for the same three feet, sixty dead sunflowers.

My name is Fern Ulrich. I live a mile outside of Akron, Colorado, on the north side of Highway 34, in the house my husband and I bought in 1979. He’s been gone six years now. I retired from the school district the year after, and I thought I would spend my old age quilting and going to circle meeting on Wednesdays.

Then my son’s marriage came apart, and Wyatt’s mother went to Denver and didn’t come back, and my son took a job on a rig crew in North Dakota because it paid three times what he could make around here.

So at 65 I became a mother again to a boy who was 3 years old. People said I was brave. I wasn’t brave. There just wasn’t anybody else, and you do what’s in front of you.

My son calls every Sunday night and comes home for a week every month or so when his hitch is over. He sends money. He loves that boy. But North Dakota is a long way from Akron, about 600 miles, and a phone is not a father.