Sunflower Season

"Carry a smile on your face.....and a sunflower in your pocket."


In Kansas, between summer and autumn there is another season called, "Sunflower". It is a time when the heat has dissolved into a mellow warmth, the sky loses its pasty white color and hues of blue return. For as far as the eye can see, in every direction, bright yellow Sunflowers dot the landscape.

They wave from the ditches like little girls in golden bonnets, bowing and stretching in soft breezes as I pass by. They vary in height and size, some shadowed in small clusters while others tower over me in a petal-covered trellis.

I look around me at the fences, barns and windmills; all commonplace objects on the rolling prairie. They were built by strong hands to help tame and maintain a farming heritage that seems to be slowly fading away.

But the Sunflowers are the offspring of this land.


Many years ago when covered wagons crossed the waving grasses of Kansas, they were met and welcomed by this native flower. I imagine pioneer children weaving them together to make wreaths for their hair and picking them for colorful supper table centerpieces. Their ancestors saw America in its beginning and each succession of seed and bloom witnessed the changes to our state. But if I stand quietly and listen carefully, I can still hear the silence of a land with less technology; the farmer's calls of encouragement to his oxen...the laughter of children dancing inside a fairy's ring with laurels of Sunflowers upon their braided hair.
As the sun moves across the sky, the plant watches then follows in eager pursuit. Fields with rows upon rows all turn their bright faces towards the light, reaching for the very thing that sustains them.

How simple that is. And how much better our own lives would be if we were like the Sunflower; greeting all around us with a bright and cheery face...and always, looking towards the Son, who sustains us too, with his ever-burning light.