Sunshine for Your Inner Sunflower
The church bell down in the valley was still humming its final lazy chime when Birdie unlatched the wooden churchyard gate, her white leather shoes clicking against the gravel. Tommy followed closely behind, unbuttoning his top collar button the second they cleared the view of the sanctuary steps.
“If Preacher Harrison preaches five minutes longer next Sunday, I am going to turn into a pillar of salt right there in the third pew,” Birdie declared, stepping off the dirt road and onto the grassy verge where the prairie weeds began.
“It wasn’t the preaching that had you squirming,” Tommy said, catching up with long, easy strides. “It was that red-winged blackbird sitting on the window ledge. You were staring at it like you were fixing to sprout feathers and fly right out the glass.”
“Can you blame me? He had nowhere to be, no sermon to sit through, and strictly no starch in his collar.” She paused at the edge of the fence line, shading her eyes with a gloved hand as she looked out at the towering wall of green and gold.
The sunflowers stood ten, twelve feet high—an ocean of heavy, golden heads swaying under the vast, unbroken Kansas sky.
“Birdie, don’t you look at that field that way,” Tommy warned, though a crack of a smile betrayed him. “Your mother spent two whole hours ironing those pleats last night. If you put so much as a speck of dirt on that dress, she’ll lock us both in the root cellar until corn harvest.”
“Mother isn’t here, Thomas,” she whispered with a dramatic raise of her dark eyebrows. “And besides, who made you the grand sheriff of Sunday afternoon?”
“I’m the voice of reason. Someone has to keep you from jumping off haylofts and chasing jackrabbits into gully-washes.”
“Reason is vastly overrated on an afternoon like this,” she shot back, her eyes dancing with bright, irrepressible mischief. She tilted her chin, hitching up the hem of her buttercup-yellow dress just enough to clear the ditch weeds. “I dare you, Thomas Miller.”
“Dare me to what?”
“Dare you to catch a bird in full flight.”
Before he could reach out to catch her sleeve, she ducked beneath the lowest drooping leaves and vanished into the thick, saffron maze of the sunflower forest.
“Birdie!” Tommy called out, ducking into the shadowed, warm green beneath the towering canopy. The heavy scent of sweet stalks, warm earth, and golden pollen hit him instantly. “You’re going to tear your hem on the stalks!”
“A hem can be mended by supper!” her voice echoed, muffled by the dense wall of fibrous stems and broad, sandpaper leaves. “A wasted Sunday afternoon cannot!”
Tommy pushed deeper into the field. Bright yellow pollen shook loose from the giant blossoms above, dusting his dark trousers and white starched shirt. “I can hear you rustling! You’re making as much noise as a John Deere combine!”
“That’s just a decoy!” she laughed from somewhere off to his left. “You’re hunting a ghost, Tommy! A very fast, exceptionally well-dressed ghost!”
He pivoted, stepping carefully over deep, damp ruts where recent summer rain had pooled in the rich loess soil. “Ghosts don’t wear petticoats that rustle like dry corn husks!”
“They do in Kansas!”
He broke into a small, sunlit pocket where a few giant stalks had leaned over, creating a golden alcove. Birdie stood on a low mound of dark earth, holding a fallen sunflower head like a parasol, her face bathed in amber light.
“See?” she said, striking an impossibly regal pose. “Queen of the prairie jungle. Bow down, farm boy.”
“Your majesty has a streak of pollen across her nose,” Tommy said, crossing his arms and trying to look stern, though his heart was hammering—half from the chase, half from the sheer sight of her framed against the sky.
She reached up, casually dusting her nose with her white glove, only to leave a bright yellow smudge across her cheek instead. “A crown is supposed to leave a mark. Now, tell me the truth—didn’t you hate sitting in that church house while all this sunshine was out here calling our names?”
“I didn’t hate it,” Tommy replied softly, taking a slow step closer. “Though I’ll admit, listening to the choir wasn’t nearly as entertaining as watching you try not to giggle when Mr. Higgins dropped his hymnal.”
“He drops it every single week!” Birdie giggled, stepping down from her earthen throne. “I think he does it on purpose just to see if Mrs. Higgins is still awake. It’s their secret code.”
“Is that what we’re doing? Playing games?”
“Life is a game, Tommy, if you don’t let the solemn folks turn it into a chore,” she said, her tone suddenly shifting into that quiet, surprisingly tender cadence she used when she was being earnest despite her playfulness. She looked up through the lattice of giant yellow heads at the vault above.
“Look at that sky. It goes on until it touches the edge of the world. Do you think the bison used to look up at it and wonder where it ended?”
“Bison didn’t wonder about things like that,” Tommy said, leaning against a sturdy stalk. “They just ate the grass and kept moving.”
“You don’t know that,” she countered, sticking her tongue out playfully. “Maybe they were poets. Maybe they looked at those big white clouds and saw giant herds running right alongside them in the blue.”
“You have an answer for everything under the sun, don’t you?”
“Only the important things.” She took two deliberate, cat-like steps toward him, her Sunday slippers squelching slightly in the soft mud beneath the layer of fallen petals. “For instance, I know that you’re secretly terrified of getting mud on your good boots.”
“I am not terrified of mud,” Tommy scoffed. “I haul mud six days a week.”
“Yes, but today is the seventh day,” she teased, taking another step, her eyes wide with wicked delight. “And on the seventh day, Tommy Miller is a refined gentleman who wouldn’t dare spoil his Sunday best.”
“Is that a challenge, Birdie?”
“It’s an observation, gentleman Thomas.”
She suddenly lunged forward, snagging his lapels with both gloved hands to pull him off balance. Tommy gasped, catching her around the waist to keep them both from tumbling into the damp earth. They swerved, boots slipping on the slick petal-strewn clay, laughing wildly as they fought for leverage in a chaotic, joyful tussle.
“Down you go, Sheriff!” she cried, wrestling with surprising strength for someone wrapped in lace and ribbons.
“Not without you, your majesty!” Tommy laughed back, catching his heel on a root and taking them both down into the soft, loam-rich earth.
They hit the ground with a soft thud, rolling together through the golden petals and wet, cool soil. Laughter burst from them both as they tussled—arms tangled, Sunday clothes instantly plastered with slick gray-black mud and dusted with bright saffron pollen. They spun and wrestled like two cubs in the grass, the innocence of their childhood games clashing delightfully with the breathless, electric proximity of their growing hearts.
Finally, Tommy managed to roll on top, gently pinning her wrists against the earth, his chest heaving, his dark hair falling across his eyes. She lay beneath him, her hat knocked askew, her cheeks flushed, her buttercup dress utterly ruined with loess mud and yellow streaks.
They both stopped, breathless, as the immense quiet of the plain rushed back in to fill the space around them.
But the Saffron sunflower forest was reflected in her eyes as it rose under the turquoise vault of heaven on pelagic plains at the edge of this ice age land they called home. In this place where bison once roamed free, they tussled on golden petals strewn on a patch of earth under the Kansas cloudscape like wrestlers in a love match for a farm boy and girl getting their Sunday best caked in loess mud for only the blackbirds to witness. Their youth wrestled with having come into the age when love was no longer a crush but the possibility of so much more including making a family. The mist in her eyes lifted. “Will you still call me Birdie?”
“Terms of affection like that grow on you and keep their freshness even in old age.”
“Well, then you’ll always be Tommy to me. Alas, my dress is too far gone for detergent. But any guilt I had for behaving like a child has gone the way of the dodo bird.”
