my fifteen year old just got her driver’s permit. today while coming home from soccer practice i asked her to pull over sharply, in a construction zone, and put on her hazards, so i could jump out of the car and grab a few stems. she couldn’t remember learning that move in driver’s ed.

these wild sunflowers are growing on six foot high plants, each with multiple flowers, in large colonies on many of our roadsides right now. a glorious celebration of high summer. i don’t know why a double armed galaxy shape suggested itself to me, but my husband saw it and started giggling about poor humanity, trapped, according to douglas adams, “far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.”

wild sunflower

along snelling avenue, saint paul, minnesota