A few weeks ago I planted some sunflower seeds along the cinder block wall in my backyard. I gave the planting area extra water every day and pulled out any weeds that I deemed to close for comfort.

After a week or so, quite a few plump little shoots were stretching their flat leafy arms in the sunlight. My care continued; watering, weeding, and crushing between my fingers the box elder bugs that dared nibble the young leaves.

By week the third, my seedlings seemed capable of caring for themselves. They had staked their claim above the sunlight-stealing grass and would be happy enough with the morning dew and the lawn sprinkler my father turned on every other day.

The weekend came and I had outslept the morning. My bee-line to the kitchen for breakfast was interrupted by my father coming in from the backyard. An aura of heat entered with him. Flecks of green stuck to his sweat-stained t-shirt. He had spoken of his intent to cut the grass the day before. My father intends many things and does little else. Perhaps it was my failure then, to lump his desires, the grand and the mundane, into the same category of possibility.

"Did you cut down my sunflowers?"

"I had to cut the grass, son."

He stepped around me and I felt his inhuman warmth and smelled the cut grass and sweat from a job well done.

My father is a man who cuts down the flowers with the grass. I tend to the flowers, keep them safe from hungry insects yet fail to stop the whirling-blades machine that makes the lawn just a lawn again, not a place of living things.

I wonder now, were there not a wall preventing him, if my father would cut the world down into even, yellow-green rows. I wonder, and despair.