Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows. It’s what sunflowers do – Helen Keller

Growing up I hated sunflowers, funny I know. But it’s not because of how they looked or their endearing qualities but how they made my skin feel.

Growing up we had two patches of dirt in our backyard and in one of them my mother would always plant sunflowers. Now, as an adult I can understand why she would, they are mystical and gorgeous. But I never really liked them because at the end of the season I would be tasked with clearing out the garden and those dratted sunflowers would always give me hives.

They would grow to be so tall, that I would have to use shears to cut them into pieces to fit inside the brown paper garden-waste bag. So that meant handling each one multiple times, trying to break their steam either with my hands or the shears. Without fail the leaves and the stalks themselves would always run all over my arms and hands and itchy nasty little hives would always break out.

Why wouldn’t I wear long sleeves? Because I would get all hot, sweaty and itchy regardless. I would try to tell my mother that I would break out every time I tore these down but she didn’t seem to care and scolded me back to the garden.

Looking back, it’s not really the sunflowers fault, but for a long time I was put off by the garden. Another reason why was because one of my chores was to water the gardens in the summer. And seemingly I would never do it well enough.

Now I think these memories have more to say about my mother and I’s relationship than my relationship with green things in general. But it’s really too bad that I despised working with living things for so long. Because now- now that I do not have some soil at my disposal and that I have a young son makes me nostalgic about my time growing up in the great outdoors.

And now that winter’s slowly making it’s exit and my son’s a bit older I feel this push to get his hads dirty too (but without the hives). I’m anticipating what type of plants I should start from seed this year, what types of herbs I should put in my window boxes and exactly how crazy I should go with raised beds in my little apartment patio. So stay tuned and I promise that later this year there will be pics of my balcony gardens and maybe a sunflower or two.