Few things are as mesmerizing in summer as driving down a country road and suddenly discovering a vast landscape of sunflowers. In field after field of yellow, red, and green, capped by sweeping blue skies and dazzling clouds, one cannot avoid the welcome sense of being completely liberated — if only for a moment — from the burdens and distractions of the spinning world. As Willa Cather suggested in My Antonia, such experiences always leave us with the gentle assurance that we are on the right road, both literally and metaphorically:
The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom."
From My Antonia
by
Willa Cather
Willa Cather
1873 - 1947
