It was in last year’s growing season while traveling to visit family, I spied through the backyard window, a row of plate sized brilliant sunflowers. I had arrived on their doorstep full of grief and great loss. Yet this day was brilliant and bright blue, and I was startled out of my grief at the joyous sight of these fun-flowers rising above the fence seeing towards the far-flung San Francisco hills.  It caught me quite by surprise. And of course, I quickly jaunted out there, camera in hand, taking lots of pictures, this way and that. I wanted to catch every angle of petal and leaf, intending to sear its memory deep into me.

I wanted to hear what these wild haired beauties had to say—because I’m crazy like that. And talk they did. And so, in reprieve, whatever grief I had been feeling floated out of me while joy slipped in. Death and loss suspended in time for laughter and light-heartedness instead.

Days and months later, I could not get those flowers out of my head.

Fast forward: I am aging well past my midlife years, and in the rainforest where I live, winters are long. My backyard is small with high walls; and in the growing seasons, when the weather warms, finds me working hard in my garden. I’m new to this thing, having not many years owned my little home. My garden—here is where bright rainbowed flowers, blueberries, basil, and mint thrive along with the volunteer green ferns unfurling themselves from the river rock along the edge.

My diminutive yard—a secret garden, a wish fulfillment of longing when searching for a home. Crying, laughing, talking to leaves and flowers, tinkling chimes in the wind, bees and butterflies. Visiting birds and chirping squirrels, and the culmination of days working hard when I fall into bed happy and tired.

This season, however, I spied a large-leafed weed that had “gifted” itself to my garden growing from a leftover pot still full of hardened soil in the corner of my yard. Days passed as I watched it, fully intending to yank it up by its roots at some point. I did not water or tend to it. In the mid-life of summer after paying no mind, I noticed it had risen in size to five feet. In curiosity, pulling my phone out to snap a photo in attempt to identify it, pictures flooded my screen full of big and beautiful plate sized sunflowers. I was stunned! So, this is what it is—the very antidote to grief I might still be carrying, to pain held in my body like the year before.

And as I looked, already curling spikes of yellow and green were trying to unfurl themselves from the top of this high-rise plant.

My garden, a sanctuary, has also taught me quite a few things. That some things just need time to reveal themselves for what or whom they are, or what may come of great loss and pain. In time, there may be a requisite wisdom or understanding that rises to the surface, and akin to nature, teaching moments while we wait when life feels spare or thick as mud.  

In the caretaking of my garden, I have been forced to plant myself firmly into its soil, giving it what it needs for the tender seeds and shoots within it to grow in this season or the next one to come. I am educating myself what needs to stay and what needs to be yanked out to insure its growth, very much like my own life. There are days of yes and days of no to what nourishes or kills. As in my life, sometimes I can only watch and wait and be surprised.

This gift of “oldening” (I just made that up!), of crone, I couldn’t have foretold when young. Each age comes bearing its inimitable gifts, its surprises, but this—what joy as I stand nightgowned, toes balanced in mud, bending down whispering, “grow, grow!”.  Whatever I’ve lost along the way, finally and with immense relief, I can look in the mirror and, no matter what, know I’m just fine, and I count.  I didn’t always think so.

Fact is, as I now know, I’ve always been okay, my soul whispering, “Grow, grow!”

s. wolfington – 2023