The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

And Merle drove past them every day.

He never slowed down. He never looked over. Not once that I saw.

But he couldn’t not see them. That’s the thing about a wall of sunflowers along a highway. You can’t drive past it with your eyes closed.

The first one opened on the eleventh of August. Wyatt found it, of course. He came tearing in the back door so fast he forgot to close it.

“Grandma, one’s open! One’s open! Come look!”

It was in the second row, one of the branching kind, about six feet tall. Yellow petals all the way around a dark brown face as big as a saucer. It was turned east, toward the morning.

Wyatt stood under it with his head tipped all the way back. The flower was over his head, and he just stood there looking up at it with his mouth open and that big gap in his teeth.

By the fifteenth there were dozens open. By the eighteenth, the whole strip had gone gold. When the sun came up over the highway, it lit them from the front, and every one of them was turned to meet it.

We built the stand that weekend. I found two old pallets behind the shed and some boards from a pen my husband had torn down. Wyatt held the boards and I drove the screws. It came out a little crooked. He said crooked was fine.

We put it at the end of the drive where it meets the shoulder, far enough back off the road that a car could pull all the way off on the gravel and be safe.

Wyatt painted the sign himself on a piece of plywood. He used the leftover paint from the porch. It said “Sunflowers $3,” and the S’s were backward at first and he painted over them and did them again.

I went down to the cellar and brought up every canning jar I owned. Pints and quarts. I washed them and lined them up on the stand and filled them with water from the spigot.

We were up before six. I cut the first stems at sunup, long ones, with my husband’s pruners, the way you’re supposed to, at an angle, early, before the heat makes them droop.

I put on my straw hat and my blue work shirt and stood behind the stand. I braided my hair back because it was going to be windy. I’m 70 and my hair has been white for twenty years, and I’ve never once thought about it until I saw that picture later.

Wyatt wore his striped orange T-shirt. He said orange was lucky. I don’t know where he got that idea, but he wore that shirt so many days that summer I washed it by hand twice a week.

He didn’t stay behind the stand with me. He went out and stood among the sunflowers in the front row, right by the shoulder, and held one stem up as high as he could so the cars could see it.

It was a bright August morning, the kind with no clouds at all and a breeze coming up off the wheat stubble. The sunflowers rustled every time a truck went by.

The first hour, nobody stopped.

Cars went past at sixty-five. Grain trucks, pickups, a minivan with Nebraska plates. The wind off them shook the whole front row. Wyatt kept holding that stem up.