I must have looked like a confused golden retriever with my head cocked to one side when I first saw the sunflower sticking up out of the ravine. It was about waist high to my position on the paved shoulder and a few feet down the hill.

Out of place.

I pass this ravine almost daily when I walk, run, or drive along the edge of Tryon Creek State Park. It’s the most direct route to and from campus. The first time I saw a sunflower was two weeks ago. They are anything but discreet in front of a backdrop of green creeping ivy, tall trees, and snarled undergrowth. It catches the eye like those hideous (-ly awesome?) pink flamingoes that were so popular.

Today the first flower had wilted, but a new sunflower stood a few feet away. It’s not huge like you see in some gardens. Our friends’ grow them with heads larger than dinner plates that stare down at me like I’m tiny (I’m not tiny, though).

This one seems miniature, maybe eight inches across the face on a stem four feet high.

I’m neither botanist nor gardener—come on, have you seen my yard?—so I don’t know if someone had to plant them here or if a bird was in on it. Maybe someone walking along Terwilliger Boulevard dropped some seeds in the ravine.

Would that even work?

The how is neither here nor there.

I love the sunflower. This specific one, not the flower in general. It’s the out of place vibe it gives off. Spot the same flower in a robust garden and it’s no big deal.

This is unlike a field of wildflowers, beautiful in their entirety, yet you can’t appreciate each individual plant.

For example, when you see a solitary purple flower creeping up through a crack in a city sidewalk amongst treading feet and tires and chaos, clinging to shreds of soil and begging for life, it’s different than the sloped field of wildflowers on Dog Mountain. In one scene, flowers proliferate, another they eke out their chance to bloom against the odds.

Flowers embody the temporary. Enjoy them alive.

If you press them between the pages of an old novel, as I have, they are preserved in some small measure. You can mount them between two pieces of window glass soldered together and make lovely art. Some of the color fades and some stays. All of the 3-dimensionality departs.

If you are a painter and you paint them, they may be beautiful, but they are anything but transitory. They are permanent and they are paint, not plant.

Some of the most striking and unsettling flower paintings hang on the wall in my favorite pizza restaurant, Bruno’s, in Longview, Washington. Dark scenes of wilted flowers in vases where I could practically smell the decay and picture the moldy, wet stems within each vase. The paintings unnerved me, yet they were closer to real. Once flowers are cut and in a vase, their life as flowers is already past. It becomes a matter of decay, prolonged although it may be by water or those little packets of white mystery powder the florist gives you.

Each time I pass by, I will scan the ravine and hope it made it another day.

I will enjoy the sunflower as long as it’s there.