The Sunflower Forest by Torey Hayden Page A

significance for her. Sunflowers had grown wild in the back garden of their cottage in Wales after the war. The way Mama talked about it, it was easy to tell that she perceived the appearance of those unexpected sunflowers as practically a religious experience. They were the sign of her resurrection, and she knew she had managed to pass through her season in Hell.
    My mother loved to tell us about those years in Wales. They were among her very best stories, spun out in epic, almost myth-like proportions, laced with lyrical descriptions of an aged land. I loved them above all the others, not only because she made them so beautiful to listen to, but also because they were the only stories about her life after the war that had the same magnificence as her tales of Lébény and her girlhood. They reassured me that she still had the capacity to be happy and that all her joy had not been dragged from her by the horrors of the war.
    The translated name of the cottage was Forest of Flowers. It was high up a mountainside in north Wales. Mama always told us how she and Daddy had had to climb the last half mile to the cottage on a small, steep path. I had a very romantic image of Forest of Flowers in my mind. I could see the narrow, meandering trail passing through sun-dappled woods, the forest floor a carpet of snowdrops and bluebells and populated with little Thumpers and Bambis. And there in the clearing, like Snow White’s cottage, was Mama’s holly hedge and the winter jasmine and the quaint wooden arch, all leading up to the whitewashed Forest of Flowers.
    Those were her sunflower years.
    In Kansas, sunflowers are grown commercially. If you go out in the late summer along the small country roads in western Kansas, you’ll come upon field after field of flowers, a sea of golden, nodding heads. In the time since we’d moved to Kansas, it had become a family ritual to drive out every few weeks to watch the progress of the sunflower fields from planting in March to harvesting in mid-autumn. In spite of that childhood experience, which still came back to me in nightmares, I enjoyed these journeys, although I never could bring myself to walk down the narrow rows between the stalks, planted in military straightness, the way Mama and Megan did. For my mother especially this observation of the sunflower crop was a most pleasurable way of marking the year. The sunflowers were the single redeeming feature of Kansas for my mother.
    By mid-March the ground underfoot was spongy and smelled of newness. The sun had grown surprisingly hot in the space of a few weeks. It was a Saturday afternoon, but despite the weather, I was in my room studying. On the next Monday we were having an exam in calculus, and I’d be the first to admit that calculus was not my best subject. It wasn’t going to be an easy test either. Mrs Browder told us on the previous Friday that she was intending to give us a set of ten problems and we had to solve eight of them. So I was frantically going back over old assignments to make sure I knew how to do them.
    Mama came to the open door of my room. ‘I feel like a walk,’ she announced.
    This caught me completely unawares because my mother had not been out of the yard since the end of January. I turned from my desk to see her standing in the doorway. She was dressed in old tan corduroys and a plaid shirt. She had one of Dad’s pullovers on, and her hair tied back with a yarn ribbon. She smiled at me, knowing, I think, that she’d surprised me.
    ‘They’ll be starting to put the sunflowers in,’ she said. ‘And I want to walk out and see.’
    ‘Mama, it’s quite a walk. Most of those fields are at least a couple of miles away or more. If you wait until Daddy comes home, I’m sure he’ll take you out in the car.’
    She remained in the doorway. She had a small smile that gave her a look of amusement. ‘Come with me, baby. We can walk that far. It’s such a beautiful day, and I’m longing to move my