Consider the Sunflower

When I was ten, my father taught me on rickety metal lawn chairs at the upstage of our driveway how to measure the distance of an approaching thunderstorm by counting the seconds between lightning and thunder-claps.

As the sky grew gray and the wind rolled in, the caterpillars that spend their summers sunbathing on our driveway scooted toward the lawn as quickly as caterpillars can scoot. It felt as if the storm was right above us, and I asked my father if we should follow the insects’ lead and head for shelter, but he told me to wait.

A lightning bolt massive enough to make the sky as bright as high noon silently flashed above us, and my dad lifted a finger. “One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five—”

Crack!

“Dad, let’s go—”

“Not yet. It’s still at least five miles away.”

I burrowed into my lawn chair, wrapping my arms around my legs to brace myself against the stinging wind. I’d grown out of the age of fearing the earth-shaking booms but not out of the displeasure of being soaked. Another lighting bolt tore the sky apart.

“Onetwothreefourfivesixsev—”

“No,” Dad stopped me. “That’s too fast. You have to have the Mississippis. They’re important.”

I took a breath, waited for the next lightning flash, and counted just as my dad had. “One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Miss—”

Crack!

“One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.”

Crack!

“Dad?”

“Not yet.”

“One Mississippi.”

Crack!

“One—”

Crack!

“Okay,” he said, finally. “Let’s go.”

I jumped out of my chair and ran into the safety of the garage. As we put our chairs away, the rain started, arriving in full force just when my father said it would. The downpour hit the concrete like tiny bullets, making the air stutter with static and turning the driveway a darker shade of gray.

________

Mother Earth was never a concept in my childhood; Earth was always a father. Growing up, my father had been the one at the head, lulling me with knowledge on how our planet turns and why it was ours. I trust he was the one who spoke most often to me while I was in the womb because his voice is the sound I now cling to in life. Directed either toward me or to the unknown galaxies beyond the solitude of my embryonic sac, the rugged reverb of his vocal cords was an integral detail of my very first environment. And what else could I do but spin in somersaults, kick at my mother’s bladder, and listen?

Even when I gained the capacities to do anything else, be anywhere else, I was always at my father’s chin, waiting to catch the words that would spill. My father’s voice came both prompted and uncoaxed, audible and unspoken. And through listening, I pieced together the meaning of my life. I learned that I lived where the world’s first camels roamed—the Great Plains of eastern South Dakota. I learned these camels were pushed out long ago, along with the plains. In their place now are small congregations of people and large expanses of agriculture. Our views are cut into strips of brown and green and are identical for miles because, I learned, that life is named by the living, and the main requirement is survival. This survival depends on my father and his farmers and on their ability to keep the camels and unproductive grasslands away and the rows of soil sprouting.

When I was I child, I rarely asked questions of my father. But there was one day that I did—a question that arguably did not come at the beginning of anything but was a start all the same, spoken within a fast-moving stream of yellow petals that are set aflame by the words.

“Why don’t any of your farmers grow sunflowers?”

I am young, in the midst of my flourishing elementary school years, sitting in the back seat of my father’s pickup while he drives us home through central North Dakota. And tucked into...