Love Flows Forward by Etya Vaserman Krichmar

Love Flows Forward | Etya Vaserman Krichmar

Before I knew the word sanctuary, I knew the sunflower fields.

They began beyond the last houses of our town in Ukraine, stretching farther than a child could see, taller than any adult, their faces lifted toward a sun that did not ask who belonged and who did not. When the world felt hostile, and often it did, I would walk there alone. The soil was dark and soft, the air thick with the green smell of leaves and sap. The stalks brushed my shoulders like quiet companions. Inside that living corridor, no one measured my name or my worth.

The field did not care that we were Jews. It only grew.

Even now, decades later, in another country, I sometimes wake in the night with that same scent in my lungs. Memory is not stored in the mind alone. It lives in the body, like roots that refuse to die even after the plant is cut.

Tonight, sleep does not return. The house is still. My daughter’s absence fills it in ways sound never could. Ten years have passed since I last heard her voice. Time has layered silence upon silence, like sediment.

I lie there thinking about the distance, about how it forms, how it hardens, and how something alive becomes unreachable. Then, in a brief slip of time, the present loosens, as it often does during the fragile hour before dawn. 

I am no longer in my bedroom. I am standing at the edge of those fields again.

The sunflowers are exactly as they were. They stand impossibly tall, their broad leaves catching light and their heavy heads turned east. The air hums with insects. A wind moves through them, slow and deliberate, bending thousands of stems at once. As a child, I believed they were breathing.

I step forward, and the earth receives my weight as if it remembers me.

Grief feels different here. Not gone. Just absorbed. In nature, nothing argues with loss. Things fall, decay, return. The field does not mourn last year’s blossoms. It transforms them.

A figure stands between the rows.

Papa.

He is not young or old. He is simply present, as though time has released its hold on him. He looks the way he did when I was small, sitting in his workshop, watching chalk glide across fabric as he worked with the same steadiness and the same quiet attention.

“You came back,” he says.

It is not a question.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” I answer.

He nods, as if this makes perfect sense. Around us, the sunflowers shift in the wind. Their dry leaves whisper against one another like pages turning.

“When I was a girl,” I tell him, “this was the only place that felt safe.”

“It still is,” he says.

I want to tell him everything—the years since he left, the life we built, the daughter who is no longer here, the questions without answers. But standing there, I find words unnecessary. The field already knows. It has seen separation before. It has watched seeds scatter far from where they began.

“I don’t understand how love can disappear,” I say finally.

Papa bends, picks up a fallen sunflower head, and turns it in his hands. The seeds are dark, tightly packed, each one a beginning disguised as an ending.

“Nothing disappears,” he says. “It changes form. You taught yourself that when you came here as a child. Why did you think people were different from the earth?”

The simplicity of it unsettles me.

A breeze passes through the field, and thousands of flowers tilt together, following light none of them can see directly.

“Love is like that,” he continues. “It moves forward. It looks for where it can grow next.”

I think of my daughter. Of the years of silence. Of the invisible thread that, despite everything, I have never felt snap.

“Will she find her way back?” I ask.

Papa does not answer immediately. He looks out across the field, where some stalks stand tall, and others have already bowed, their work finished.

“When the season changes,” he says, “the field does not chase the seed. It prepares the ground.”

The words settle into me with the weight of comfort. Prepare the ground.

The field has always known this: You cannot force a return. You can only remain capable of receiving it.

The light grows stronger. The edges of things begin to blur—not vanish, but thin, like mist lifting from soil. I feel the familiar pull of waking.

“I don’t want to lose this,” I tell him.

“You won’t,” Papa says. “You are made of the same persistence.”

The sunflowers sway once more, a slow, collective turning. Then the light begins to drain, the field thins, and the ordinary shape of my room returns. 

Morning has fully arrived. The room is ordinary again—the dresser, the chair with yesterday’s sweater, the faint hum of the refrigerator down the hall. I stand there for a while, letting the quiet settle around me. On the windowsill, a small plant leans toward the light, its leaves turned in one clear direction. I touch the soil. It is dry, still capable of receiving water.  I pour water slowly and watch the soil absorb it. The leaves lift, almost imperceptibly.

I leave the glass beside it, ready for tomorrow.

Somewhere far from here, another morning opens.

Bonus audio of Etya reading her essay…

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