I had a battle for the sun today. I braved hornets and hives to chop back the first handful of sunflowers, to try to let some of the tomatoes have access to sufficient light. I've learned several things. One, sunflowers need stronger blades than small kitchen scissors to cut cleanly and easily. Next time I'm coming at them with pruners. Two, I appear to be allergic to sunflowers. My hands and wrists were itchy, stinging, and covered with hives. It was no fun touching the bristly stalks. Three, there are far more hornets in my new yard than I am comfortable with. Spiders, too (they like to build thick mats of webs in the raspberries). I've heard that if I build a fake hornets nest, even an imprecise paper mache approximation of one, that should chase off the territorial little pollinators. There are also honey bees and big bumblebees, but in far smaller numbers than hornets. I need to change that. It still surprises me how relaxed I am in the middle of clouds of bees and hornets, brushing up against the flowers they are trying diligently to work through. I wondered whether they would be mad at me for cutting out blooms and clipping dinnerplate sized leaves to drop on the ground. They buzzed loudly and jumped around while I shook the stalks, but no one seemed to complain directly to me.
Growing up I didn't really "get" Vincent Van Gogh. I wasn't all that impressed with his paintings, no pun intended. After seeing Don McLean in concert in college, I started listening to his song "Vincent" and thought maybe I wasn't giving the artist a fair shake, but it took me a long time to get over my initial dislike of Impressionism to really consider his work as I should have. Ten or eleven years ago, I was in a phase where I painted things on t-shirts, and I decided it would be fun to do my own copy of one of the Sunflowers paintings on a sweatshirt. I worked on it for several days, and I was insanely proud of my accuracy. I donated it to a charity auction, but it didn't catch much interest. That, or Mr S-P really liked it and intentionally outbid someone in the silent auction. (I always assumed he was the only bid, but I never had the self confidence to ask and be able to handle the repercussions.) After that, I had this weird possessive connection with that painting, like, "Yeah, me and Vincent, we both painted that." In the last year I finally saw the "Vincent and the Doctor" episode of Dr Who, and that sort of sealed the deal. I had found the pathos I lacked as a young woman, and, as McLean sang, "Now I understand what you tried to say to me."
Today, trying to manhandle those rough sunflower stems, getting nettles in every inch of skin up to my elbows, and fighting to keep the top-heavy flowers upright while I arranged them in a vase (I failed, and got water everywhere), I almost thought of Van Gogh as a bit of a badass for working with them in so many different ways. I seriously disliked touching them. They sure are pretty, but I'm kind of dreading getting out there for the next skirmish in the battle for the sun.
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