I don’t know why some moments become lifelong memories, while other, maybe more important ones, are completely forgotten. I remember taking a walk with my grandma on a summer day along a dirt road. The bitter perfume smell of some sort of weed was powerful in the afternoon heat. The edges of the road were covered in a layer of thick dust. My grandma was picking black eyed Susans. She had a big armful of them. I remember her hands while she was picking the flowers. She had rheumatoid arthritis, and her knuckles were swollen and twisted. I thought she was very old, and it never occurred to me that she had ever been anything but old, and that I would ever be anything but a child. She told me black-eyed Susans were her favorite flower.

The fields this year are absolutely full of Black-eyed Susans and sunflowers, I guess because of all the rain. It feels like I have never seen so many. Some call them all sunflowers, some say brown eyed Susans, some say black. It doesn’t matter much, I guess what we call them, but I think the lower growing ones are the black-eyed crew and the taller ones are technically sunflowers. They seem to grow together in unmowed fields. Regardless of the names, whatever they are, there are thousands, maybe millions of them everywhere I go.

One thing I notice about these plants is that their faces are always towards the sun. When the morning light first breaks over the hill, there they are with their sun ray petals turned up to greet the day, striving to reach as much light as they can. The whole day long, no matter how hot it gets, they swivel on long, thin stalks, following the light until it goes down.

In one of the big storms we had a few weeks back, the black-eyed Susans that grow along the dirt road where I walk my dog got hit pretty hard. Hail and a downpour, winds that were pretty much tornados in strength, tore them up badly. All the flowers were wilted down, and I thought they were gone. The next day, however, the hardy little fellows were back at it, following the sun, reflecting their love of it in the way their petals mimic the rays of light you can see best just at dawn and sunset.

The early mystic Christians taught that the sun is a true reflection of the nature of God, the closest we can come to seeing him ourselves. It gives light to the world. The sun causes all that is alive to grow. Seeing a sunrise can give strength to us even through the hardest times. I think it is an encouragement. No matter how dark the night gets, there will come a dawn. The light returns and brings with it a promise. As the sun comes again every day to provide what we need for survival, so God does not forget us, even through the difficult days, his return is a promise as well.

The beauty of these little sun lovers, with their dark centers that are really more petals of more flowers, is their love of the light. They cannot seem to get enough of long summer days, and there is a form of joy in the way they dance in a breeze, almost like the world is saying everything is going to turn out alright. Watching them, my mind goes back to smell dusty weeds on that dirt road in the heat. The slow ripening of the world in the high days of the sunlight is here, and the flowers are reflecting the joy the world takes in a summer day.

My grandma is gone now, and my hands look older too. Every time I walk my dog up by the patch of black-eyed Susans and sunflowers, every time I see a field simply filled with them, glowing brightly against the setting sun, I feel revived. There is something about seeing the determined little flowers that stirs my soul. It gives me hope to watch them. Through the storms and through the lovely days, they are following the light wherever it goes. It’s like an invitation. Black-eyed Susans are my favorite flowers.

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com