“It’s almost Fall,” Whitney whispered into one of the still-closed buds of our sunflowers on the porch. Her voice was just loud enough to carry through the flower’s microphone and down the stem to its roots. I rolled my eyes, thinking they’d never listen.

But her coaxing worked, and the sunflower finally opened up this morning. We thought we’d have two bright yellow flowers all summer long, but until today we had only short stalks while the next door neighbor’s sunflowers have been brilliant since June.

At first glance, you might blame the late bloom on our small flowerpots, but I suspect it’s because we never water the damn things. Whitney goes away for a weekend and I forget, or I go away and she forgets, and each week the plants seem to lose more leaves than they gain. So I’m surprised the notion of flowering even came to their minds.