Four books, four days. Three of the plants were ones you’ve mowed. This one you’ve been looking up at since you were small.
Dandelion, clover and plantain grow at your feet and ask for almost nothing. They’re the quiet ones, and across the first series they get quieter each time. Sunflower comes from the other end of the shelf, where the pattern runs the other direction.
It’s also a plant that doesn’t wait for permission. It turns up along a fence, under a feeder, in a crack in the dirt. One head can hold more than a thousand seeds, set in the Fibonacci pattern of two spirals running opposite ways. A young plant follows the sun across the sky all day. A grown one stops turning, faces east, and stays.
The book starts before page one. A squirrel is eating lunch on a bird feeder, cheeks full, tail hanging over the edge like he holds the deed. At the base of the post, in the cracked dirt where the spilled seed ends up, something pale green has pushed through the gravel. Two fat leaves, an inch tall. He hasn’t noticed.
The book opens with a gift, and it isn’t the sunflower’s. It’s Twig’s. He doesn’t know yet where the seeds come from. He only knows what you do with a good thing, which is run it over to somebody you love and say, you have to try this. I called the first act The Offering, and the offering belongs to a squirrel before it belongs to a plant.
Twig is pointing at lunch. Cedar is looking at the plant. That gap is what this book is about. The squirrel is right, the seeds really are the best thing, and the boy is right too. The pictures never pick a winner. They keep putting the same object in front of both of them and let you notice who’s looking at what.
