Sunflower Season
There’s a time of year when the earth feels like it’s holding its breath. Its not quite summer anymore, not quite fall. Just… glowing.
Sunflower season.
The days are still warm enough to walk barefoot into the backyard, but the nights carry that first hush of coolness which is a reminder that something is turning. And somehow, in that turning, the world opens wider than at any other time.
Dahlias bloom like galaxies. Tomatoes drip sun-warm into waiting hands. The basil is still begging to be pinched, and the apples have started blushing on the branch. The leaves have just started to shift. It’s a threshold of flavor, color, scent and a time when the earth says, “You don’t have to choose. You get to have it all, just for a moment.”
Maybe that’s why this is the season I gave birth to both of my babies. The world was ripe. And I was already warmed by the sun and made ready for the new by the turning.
There is a specific kind of magic here, in the homemade pies and the jars of pickles on the counter, in the golden stalks reaching skyward beside children who are also growing taller and in the way time feels both endless and fleeting as the cicadas sing and the early apples fall.
It is the season of abundance without urgency. Of richness without rush. The sacred middle. The soft exhale before the world curls inward again. And I am never more myself than I am in this liminal in-between. Hands still sticky from peaches. Children still smelling like sunshine. Heart still humming with the ache of how fast it all goes, and the bittersweetness of having noticed.
Sunflower season.
The season where I mother best. Where I remember I, too, am fruit-bearing, light-soaked, and full. Where nothing is quite ending yet and everything is already beginning again.