From My Little Hole in the Wall: Esme's Sunflower of Ukraine

Just for today. Just for now, and the next few minutes, let's celebrate the sunflower.

I can remember when my husband and I first moved to Auburn, California. We'd lived in Silicon Valley amidst traffic and the growing congestion of the high-tech industry. I grew up there in Sunnyvale. Back then it was fruit orchards and canneries, like Libby. We could walk down the street and pick sweet apricots and cherries from every front yard where the trees were ignored. We bicycled past orchards of fruit just begging to be sampled and savored, and it was a child's life.

Time and tide, and I found myself living on 4.5 acres in what seemed at the time, the middle of nowhere. At least that's how it felt after escaping the city. My husband learned how to garden when he was just a boy, and his grandfather's farm was a haven to him.

One of the first things we did to the place, was eradicate all the blackberry and star thistle, and he built us a garden where we could grow our own vegetables. It was thrilling and novel to me as each year I could help cultivate pumpkins to spread around the yard and home at Halloween. We still grow corn in summer, and it was fun to build corn shocks for fall to put those pumpkins around. But the loveliest and most wonderful plant we ever grew was the sunflower. How tall they grew! So brilliant and strong. I loved watching as squirrels and birds alike fed merrily on them.

I was never one for drying them for the seeds, and they were perfect summer color and nutrition for the wildlife around us.

Sunflowers were cultivated in North America as far back as 3000 B.C. They were originally developed for food, medicine, dye, and oil. Later, they were exported to the rest of the world by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s.

Tsar Peter the Great was so fascinated by the sunflowers that he saw in The Netherlands, that he took some back to Russia. They became popular for their oil, and by the early 19th century, the northern countries were planting millions of acres of sunflowers every year.

Sunflowers were already Ukraine's national flower before they emerged as a symbol of resistance. This came to pass when a widely shared video clip appeared showing a Ukrainian woman berating Russian soldiers, telling them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that flowers would grow after they died in battle.

Quickly, the beautiful sunflower was being drawn, painted, made into emojis, turned into beautiful art, again, and who knew better of the sunflower's magical appeal, than Vincent Van Gogh, himself? Many poems have been written of the sunflower as its quality of following the sun from morning till

night, turning its lion mane head in the process.

I was having another sleepless night and thinking what next I could do to soothe my weary mind and dig deep in a project that would bring me comfort. A little lightbulb went off, and tiny, 6" Esme, popped into my mind with the creating of a sunflower dress for her. I saw it all in a split second from the blue Valenki boots to the band of red roses on her head.

So that morning I got up, pulled my wool colors together and snipped a sunflower petal off one of the faux sunflowers in the arrangement on the side table for a pattern. Esme would be needing a new floral gown anyway, as spring is here and her holly outfit needed to be retired to her box.

I made this up on the fly using her panty pattern to make her another olive-green pair, and constructed a brown bodice to support the brilliant yellow petals. Each little petal is machine

stitched with ribs, then each petal was sewn at the base in a pinch. I pinked a green band and sewed it to the bodice, then hand-stitched two rows of the petals on.

I was so surprised when the machine stitching allowed the petals to be formed upwards to float. Creating this costume for her gave me a little bit of peace and purpose, and she can stand on my shelf as hope for the future in sunflower glory.

I've been collecting some beautiful art works to share on FB each day, and I'd like to share them with you now. I hope the brilliant colors lift your spirits as much as they do mine.

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do." - Helen Keller

Love,

Melissa