Sun Flower, Bi-color Pro-Cut from Majestic Valley Farms on the
Tittmann property farmed by Aaron Silverblatt-Buser, Corrales,
NM, photos © 2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
My mother is a simple woman.
She has thin lips, and for that reason she will put on lipstick if she’s going out. She hates her eyebrows, says they end too soon, at the midpoint. She actually went so far as to get tattooed eyebrows several years back.
When my sister brought Mom back from the tattoo shop, I was alarmed. It looked like someone took a Sharpie and cleanly marked a thick black line above each eye. I lied and told her they looked fine, that the tattoos were, in fact, a big improvement.
Fortunately, the tattoos soon faded into a more natural-looking gray, and so in the end, I wasn’t such a liar after all.
My mom loves the sun. Not in one of those sun-worshipper ways. She never sat outside on a plastic lawnchair until her skin turned orange-brown. But she does suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, or so we suspect.
Even one overcast day and she becomes melancholy. She might read in bed or sit on the couch, occasionally looking out the window and wondering if the sun will make an appearance.
If you call her on one of our rare overcast days, she’ll say something like, “Ew, I just hate this weather.” She hates the wind, too. It makes her irritable.
Mom’s favorite flower is the sunflower. Big dark center surrounded by bright yellow petals. Native to the Americas.
The sunflower plant grows tall, taller than my small mom. In the bud stage, the sunflower is heliotropic — at sunrise the faces of most sunflowers turn toward the east, and over the course of the day they move to track the sun.
This year Mom decided to plant sunflowers in their small patio-home yard. My parents have narrow flower beds in every available space, and in those beds they plant all types of perennials and annuals. They also grow spearmint for iced tea, rosemary for cooking, and three or four tomato plants. Mom’s favorite food very well might be a homegrown tomato sliced open, sprinkled with salt and pepper.
My parents made room for the large sunflower plants, bought seeds, and in May put the seeds into the soil. The plants started blooming this week. They are sweet. The blossoms are not many. Just a couple, not even enough to fill a vase. Still, they make my mom happy.
Someone, somewhere else grew more majestic sunflowers than Mom’s. A young organic farmer, passionate and hard-working, is cultivating an impressive farm — Majestic Valley Farms on the Tittmann property in Corrales, NM. Heart of the Rio Grande Valley. The farmer’s name is Aaron Silverblatt-Buser, and recently his Bi-Color, Pro-Cut sunflowers were ready to harvest. They came early in the week, days ahead of the weekly Corrales Growers Market.
Emails went out. Beautiful sunflower bouquets for sale, reasonably priced. Many people responded. I was one of them.
Yesterday, at lunchtime, I called Mom from my cell phone.
“I’m in your driveway, and I have something for you.”
“What do you have?”
“Open the garage door and you’ll see.”
Dad let me in. “Wow,” he said, and he shuffled from the door back toward the living room. His arms have gotten thin.
It was overcast yesterday morning. Mom sat on the couch, near the window, like a heliotropic plant herself catching whatever light she could.
“Oh my God, those are beauuuutiful,” she exclaimed, laughing as she got up off the couch.
I set the vase on the fireplace hearth.
“No, no, put them here, where we can see them.” She cleared a more central spot.
The flowers fit Mom perfectly. I think we all have a flower that is just our own. Just like how certain colors complement our complexions, or how we feel kinship toward one animal or another. Mom is the sunflower; the sunflower is Mom.
Just today I remembered how in our dining room growing up there hung a reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s masterpiece Sunflowers. I hadn’t put two-and-two together until writing this post. Mom also adored a poster I bought years ago for my oldest daughter, Diego Rivera’s Girl with Sunflowers. It sometimes take years to realize deep in your heart that something is dear to someone you love.
By now Mom’s eyebrows are back to their original half-bald, cut-off-mid-way condition. I doubt she’ll get them tattooed again, although I bet she toys with the idea. I’d take her in if she wanted a touch up.
Hell, I’d be the first in line to take her in if she suddenly declared that she wanted a sunflower tattoo on her shoulder. She’d look gorgeous with one.
A-Not-Terribly-Authoritative List of Sunflowers in Art & Poetry
- Sunflower Sutra by Allen Ginsberg
- Ah Sunflower by William Blake
- An Ode to the Kansas Sunflower. by Ed. Blair.
- A Sunflower from Maggie, 1937 by Georgia O’Keeffe
- Sunflowers by Georgia O’Keeffe
- Garden of Sunflowers by Gustav Klimt
- Sunflowers, c.1888 by Vincent van Gogh (link in text above)
- Girl with Sunflowers by Diego Rivera (link in text above)
- …feel free to add your own…
-Based on a Writing Practice done for the topic post WRITING TOPIC – NAMES OF FLOWERS.
-Related to posts PRACTICE – Sunflower and More Sunflowers.
great piece. its so nice to hear stories of family members. i feel like there is so much to learn about your elders that is seldom articulated to us of the younger generation. sometimes the focus is too much on our lives, and on our current achievements.
i hardly know any of my grandparents dislikes/likes, etc. this piece makes me want to spend more time with nanny and papa.
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beautiful
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Thanks, beak. That is true about grandparents, in particular. They want to hear all about their grandchildren. Mom and Dad, especially. They’re so proud of your accomplishments.
I remember when I was in my early 20s, it struck me, too, that I wanted to spend more time with my grandparents. I spent a couple of weekends with them, just me. I was living in Santa Fe. It was strange because I’d never been there without the whole family.
Right after that Grandma died. I was glad I got to be with her as much as I did.
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Thanks, Estrella Luna. So nice to hear from you again.
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I am curious now to know what your flower is, ybonesy.
The photo is quintessential.
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You know, it’s funny how life works. I’ve been seeing you on comments on my friend’s blogs for months. I played around checking out places on the NaBloPoMo July blogroll and found another site not only with you commenting, but LazyBuddhist and Robin as well. So I finally had time and found your place and what are you doing? Writing a beautiful post about sunflowers and mothers and memories. You know what I have hanging in my dining room? That very same Van Gogh reprints – one my favorite artists and paintings ever. I guess it’s time I added you to my google reader 🙂
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So cool that you landed here! I usually find other blogs by checking out the blogrolls of my friends and/or clicking on commenters, but somehow I missed you. Probably because I’ve had less time to just roam like that of late.
I’ll check out your blog, too. Surely there is synchronicity at work here. Glad you stopped by and commented. The tree in your avatar is quite dramatic. Reminds me of another continent.
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leslie, I saw your question earlier today but then realized I wasn’t quite sure what my flower is. I love sunflowers and have grown them quite a bit. Hollyhocks, too. And blue flax. I tend toward plants that are hardy and can grow without much water.
My mother-in-law has to be a geranium, and her own love for them has caused me to grow a bunch. I have about seven or eight blooming in pots right now, and they’re glorious.
I once had a flower garden that was filled with daisies.
So, all of these are the flowers I love the most. I never had quite an appreciation for the simple, hardy marigold until I went to India. Cosmos are nice.
It might have the be the hollyhock. I have admired them for all my adult life. I have grown off and on. My latest attempts, here at this place, have not succeeded.
Argh, this is hard. Why do I go and say those things without testing them on myself?? What’s your flower, leslie??
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I SO enjoyed this Yb! You know I am madly in love with roses (especially wild or antique), but I count sunflowers among my favorites too, and I love to paint them! 🙂
I also love lilies, moon flowers, and zinnia’s. I planted some moon flowers a few weeks ago. The vines are up so now I am waiting for the flowers to form. They truly are magical!!
Yet I have to say some of the most beautiful flowers are counted as weeds…therefore I think there really are no weeds. It is all subjective isn’t it?
Thank you for sharing your wonderful family with us again.
Wishing you and yours sunflower days!
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In May, I spent a week with my mother and father. It was late spring in the Pacific Northwest and the gardens were at their most generous moment. At 45 years old, to travel ‘home’ on my own, with no children, no wife, and no agenda, was a wonderful experience. My mother’s favorite is the pink and white cherry blossoms that hang inches above the moss covered cedar roof.
My mother has long found her way into my writing practice. Your entry triggered a context from which to explore this relationship. You used the sun and sunflower beautifully. Spending a week with my mother was spending a week in her garden.
In the last few hours since first reading your post, I have tread gently on the recently turned soil, being careful to avoid uncovering the dreaded dormant cliché bulb and its predictable pantheon of gardening metaphors.
For now, as writing practice commences, I will explore these thoughts and if nothing else comes, at least I can add another half a dozen flowers to my list….
Thanks for your words.
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Stunning images. Sunflowers are my favorite.
When I lived on the farm I planted a few one spring. They were pretty. Little did I know that the next year, those lovely seeds, spread by pesky squirrels, would germinate, grow, and blossom everywhere. It was a sight to behold.
Thanks for adding a little wonder and beauty to my Sunday afternoon.
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Thanks for stopping by, Suz. I just loved reading your recent post about your connection to the rose.
My father’s flower is the zinnia. That and the dahlia. His mother’s favorite flower was the dahlia, as I recall. Zinnias are one of those hardy, colorful flowers that grow beautifully here in the dry Southwest.
Oh, yes, I think you’re right about weeds. One of the plants that grows native around here is the globemallow. A lot of people think it’s a weed, in part because when it grows closer to the river, it gets huge. But it has the most intriguing light orange/salmon-colored blossom (LINK). I’ve never seen that color in a flower except for this one.
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ybonesy, I wanted to wait until I had more time to read this piece. I just did. It is beautiful — tender and sad at the same time. When I read pieces like this, I am reminded of how fragile the relationships to our parents and grandparents are. And how strong is the tie that binds us. I long to spend more time with my mother, my family, my siblings, relatives I want to connect with. Because those opportunities will not always be there.
Your photographs are stunning, too. And remind me that I was visiting with you almost exactly a year ago today. And we went to the growers market (called the farmers market in this neck of the woods) and I was really taken with the sunflowers. We had great conversation that trip, too (LINK).
Sometime I’d love to be there again when they are harvesting them. And maybe visit Aaron Silverblatt-Buser’s sunflower farm. I remember when I lived in Montana, there would be acres and acres of the yellow mustard seed blooming and it was so beautiful. Like Bo’s photograph of the purple wild flax that amuirin referred to (Comment #22 on WRITING TOPIC – NAMES OF FLOWERS (LINK). Thank you for writing this piece.
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Kevin, great to hear from you. Your description of the pink and white cherry blossoms that hang inches above the moss covered cedar roof — so lush sounding.
I’m glad to hear this piece triggered a context with which to explore your relationship with your mother. For me, it started with a desire to talk about my mom’s love of sunflowers. I also did the most basic of research on sunflowers, which provided details about their heliotropism, etc.
My mother has also been turning up a lot in my Writing Practice. I think it’s in part because I’ve been ruminating on who she is besides my mother. Maybe it’s something we “children” do when we are struggling ourselves to find or maintain our own identities.
Best of luck to you as you excavate this particular source. (See…excavate, unearth — you’re right…it’s easy to get wound up in the metaphors.)
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Little did I know that the next year, those lovely seeds, spread by pesky squirrels, would germinate, grow, and blossom everywhere. It was a sight to behold.
Stevo, this was exactly what I was thinking when I saw Mom’s tiny little space devoted for her few sunflowers…I wondered if they would take over next year, as I’ve experienced them do when I’ve planted them. Ah, we’ll see. A big field of sunflowers gone wild is, indeed, a beautiful sight.
Hey, QM, thanks for reminding me about the growers market last year. I do remember how attracted you were to the sunflowers. Maybe you can come to NM this time next year and we’ll visit Majestic Valley Farm. Hey, growers market it going on as we speak. It rained all night and is very overcast and cool this morning. We’re kind of in the mood to just hang out here.
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ybonesy, Liz and I are hanging out at a local Starbucks and writing on our laptops for breakfast. (This is one of our ideas of fun!) I’m just checking in after taking yesterday off. It’s a beautiful day and last night was just fabulous. We had tornado touchdowns Friday night (outlying areas) and then the heat broke. Wonderful weather for the moment.
It’s a good day to hang around. And then later, I have to get packing for the trip. Ice coffee is good this morning. It reminds me how my own mother used to make and love ice coffee when she was lying out in the sun when I was growing up. She loves the Sun, too. And flowers. 8)
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yb, the raindrops are falling here, just as I was about to go out & do a few errands. Oh well, it brought me back to this lovely post, so not all is lost. What beautiful pictures of the sunflowers! And all of the memories that this post helped emerge from the depths of my heart & soul.
My very favorite flowers are daisies, black eyed susans,gladiolus, & zinnias.
My Grandmother loved her poppy’s, born of seeds she brought back from Mexico. We often wondered if these were the same seeds used to produce opium! We used to joke about this, but she was not amused.
Every Sunday, my Dad would take her a bouquet of flowers that he had grown in his own flower garden. When Pap died, my Dad stopped this practice, for fear that it would upset her in her time of grief. After 3 weeks she called my Dad & told him how much she missed them, so every Sunday he continued the delivery, until the the seasons ended.
What a wonderful thing you did for your Mother & I think a sunflower tattoo would be the ultimate! D
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I love the incidental and casual detail in this piece—your father’s arms are thin—and the way it rounds on its end with an inevitability you don’t recognize until nearly the end. I wish I could write so tenderly and honestly about my mother. Beautiful.
You’ve started me think about what flower might be mine. I’ll have to spend more time investigating.
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Lavender, I think. I think my flower must surely be the lovely lavender. I’m going through a time of searching, calming, and I’ve had the lavender to see me through many hours of restlessness. When I want a breath of calm, I go pick a few spikes and lay it upon my pillow. And then I rest with it, too.
For a long time I loved the splashy sunflowers and the deep, intoxicating beauty of roses. The finery of the delicate columbines, too. As a little girl I was all into violets. But I think now I’m settling into lavender.
Didn’t realize until just now that you can grow “in and out” of different flowers. But I guess that is what I have done over the years. Hmmm! Interesting!
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Lavendar is soothing, isn’t it? We just celebrated the annual Lavendar Festival in the north valley, near where I live. I went last year, not this year, and I was in awe of the wonderful products local farmers created with their lavendar.
Yes, it is interesting to hear you talk, Bo, about growing in and out of different flowers. I wonder if that’s what’s happened with me and why I can’t seem to land on “the one.”
D, thanks for the comment. Really nice to hear from you.
diddy, those are some great flowers, all hardy. Hmmm, wonder if your grandmother did bring the “wrong” kind of poppy. I guess those are outlawed, yes? I think the Mexican poppy is OK, though. Hey, I also saw your flower haiku. So wonderful to read.
QM, sounds like you had a fun morning. Iced coffee, yum.
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yb, the story of the Mexican poppy came to light when they became outlawed. At least that is how I remember it. She had brought the seeds back with her years before & they came from a field of them that she had my Pap stop at along a road. I still have my suspicions that they were of the illegal variety. I suppose I found a little bit of humor in believing that! But they were very hardy & she would gather seeds every year & plant more of them in the early spring. D
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Flowers and mothers seem to go together. My mother loved flowers. She surrounded the house with irises of every color she could find. She had a row of peony bushed (pronounced pine-ees, pee-O-nies, or pennies depending to whom you spoke in my family).
Her favorite indoor flower was the African violet. When I was small she had tin cans planted with them on every surface in my bedroom and my parents’ bedroom. She had them in every imaginable color and single, double, triple blossms. She kept them in roasting pans. They grew in all kinds of condition from heavy shade and cold breezes to full sun and cold breezes. She couldn’t kill them. Women from church would bring her their violets and ask, “Lucile, do you think you can save this one?” She would.
She loved flowers all of her life.
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I am a handful of wildflowers, at least one of each.
But if I had to choose just one, it’s the daisy.
They always bloomed in June for my birthday, and there was always a field of them, enough for me to pick an obscenely large bouquet.
I did not like the flower ‘game’ of plucking petals, “he loves me, he loves me not”.
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leslie, I’m with you on the wildflowers…they’re just so, well, wild. 8)
Yeah, I’m not a big fan of denuding daisies. And didn’t you find as a kid that you could sort of cheat at the game? I did. No matter what, I always landed on He loves me. (smile)
But, I do want to say that what I love about daisies is how they grow in such large numbers. They really take to an area, and I love about them. I planted Shasta daisy seeds last month, which are just now coming up. I did have some reservations about the flowers taking over the space. Hopefully they’ll actually bloom before summer is over, and if they do, I also hope they end up co-existing with the larkspur.
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Bob, just from the description of your mom and her tin cans planted with African violets, I feel like I’ve met her before. Were those exotic at a certain time? Did women pass them around? I just have this memory of them, too. Not my mom, but someone’s.
I didn’t realize they came in all different colors. I seem to remember a bloom that resembled the Jumping Jack pansy…purple, black, white, yellow.
I always remember those mothers of my friends (and my own) who loved flowers. In those days, you rarely met someone who didn’t.
House plants, too. I have exactly three, I think. It’s hard enough to keep outdoor plants thriving. But my mom has now and has always had many house plants, an entire house of them. Same with all my friends mothers. I hadn’t quite clicked on that point until your comment, Flowers and mothers seem to go together.
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diddy, there’s something special about a field of poppies, isn’t there? I like the big red Oriental kind, and the smaller orange-yellow ones. Once I grew pink ones with layers that reminded me of those tissue flowers we used to make and put on the cars of newlyweds. I didn’t like them as much. They almost looked fake, or, I guess I felt they were more carnation than poppy. Silly of me. So picky. I got them from my great-aunt in Colorado Springs, and now all my poppy seeds are mixed up in a single jar. I didn’t realize there were so many varieties. I think I was aiming for the good ol’ illegal-looking variety. 8)
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ybonesy, in 1950’s America everything out of the ordinary was exotic in that black and white, drab world. I think African violets would have qualified. The “ladies from church” would pass around snips of plants for other people to grow.
My mother’s window sills would be covered with water-filled, glass jelly jars and cuttings that she was rooting. I remember that she would rubber-band wax paper over the top of the little jar and then jab a small hole in it. She would place the broken off leaf of the African violet in the water and VOILA in a few weeks you would have tiny leaves on leaves and a new plant in the works.
African violets came in purple, lavender, pale yellow, intense yellow, pink, white, periwinkle, and other shades for the more exotic kinds.
Poppies entered my backyard by some outside force and one spring my friend, Greg, said, “Don’t mow your back yard until after the poppies bloom.” I didn’t even know that I had poppies. That spring the most gorgeous orange poppies bloomed and the next spring 3 times that many bloomed and this year the whole yard was covered with them. What a welcome sight in late April
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This post moved me, partly because your mother sounds like she is cut from the same piece of cosmic cloth as my own, and partly because it was so masterfully crafted. Thank you for this.
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Thanks, Deborah. I appreciate your comment.
Bob, your details on the African violet and how new plants started from snipped leaves — it reminds me of starter dough. I don’t know, something about the passing around of all these tiny starter plants.
I wonder if many of them ever got transplanted into bigger pots, and then what happened to the plants? I always seem to recall African violets as temporary plants, always planted in coffee cans or plastic tubs, never in terra cotta pots. But maybe I’m just fixated on the temperal nature, on the trend.
Oh, and back to the starter dough…Jim and I met a man weekend before last who owns a B-and-B in town. He’s in his 70s, and he told us that he cooks every day a sourdough bread to die for. That it’s based on a 100-plus year starter dough. Can you imagine? Like a flame that hasn’t ever been extinguished for 100+ years.
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Invasive flowers is an oxymoron.
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Yeah, no such thing as, right?
Invasive weeds is redundant…; – )
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There’s an almost childlike voice to this post which is wonderful and those flowers, beautiful. My mother and brother both suffer from SAD, me I love winter, the dark drawing in, I’ve always preferred night (I know, I’m the exception to the rule and given I live in England, I’m lucky).
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Thanks, Jo. I like winter, too. And living in England sounds wonderful. I have a writer friend who just came back from a two-week writing workshop there, and she is in love with London. Darkness suits some writers and artists well.
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Late to reading this, and so as not to worry about echoing other comments, I didn’t read the comment section yet.
This touched me to read. The attention you pay to details about your mom, that’s something rare I think to do when someone is still living. To really know them, to think about what makes them them. When you’re very close to someone you usually don’t look at them that way, and when you’re distant, living your own life, taking the time to look at a person like mom that way, is also kind of rare. This is a very loving tribute to who she is, independent of even her connection to the author. It was a generous post, in detail and attention.
* * * * * *
This sentence really stopped me for a moment, and made me think:
It sometimes take years to realize deep in your heart that something is dear to someone you love.
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