“So what season are sunflowers?” he asked.
He returned in October, when the air turned sharp and the goldenrod had faded. The sunflowers were no longer bright yellow; they were bowed and brown, their faces heavy with black-and-white striped seeds. Chickadees pecked at the heads, and the stalks rattled like old bones in the wind.
Elara knelt beside a sunflower whose head was just beginning to droop with the weight of its ripening seeds. “Wait three months,” she whispered.
