Sunflowers, worms, and other (potentially) dead things

I gasped in horror at the window ledge. Oh, god, not the sunflowers.

I had checked on them Monday night as I worked on the dishes. At that time there were three perky sprouts bobbing happily in the kitchen window.

And then disaster struck Tuesday morning.

There they were, hanging limply over the edge of the peat pot like the scraggly turnip greens in the bottom drawer of my vegetable crisper. I didn't want to look too closely, fearing that the cats had taken down another innocent victim. My cats, you see, rule at destroying all things of value in our household--our leather couch, our dining room table, our wooden blinds, our carpet, our sanity. It made sense that the little innocent seeds that Lilly admires on a daily basis would be the next tragedy to add to their growing rap sheet.

I couldn't help but survey the damage that my furry felons had obviously causes (and plot how to best get back at the cats for killing my daughter’s green joys). And, to my shock, the delicate stems were unsnapped, the leaves unmunched.

As I stood back from my close inspection, I realized what it meant. We'd forgotten to water the seeds. WE HAD KILLED LILLY'S PLANTS! I quickly doused them with water in the hopes that I could still revive them, and placed them back on the windowsill. Maybe they would perk up quickly before Lilly had a chance to notice.

"Plant broke?" I heard behind me. Lilly toddled into the kitchen and followed my gaze to the kitchen windowsill. "Plant broke?" she said again, concern knotting her brows."Plant? Plant!"

I picked her up and showed her the wilted seedlings: "I'm sorry, sweetie. The plants got too thirsty and fell over. Maybe they're not dead."

This was the second time in less than 24 hours that I had to talk with my daughter about death. Okay, so it's not like her cats got run over (though at times I secretly hope they escape and get eaten by coyotes, particularly after they do something extraordinarily heinous, like crapping on the floor just outside their perfectly clean litter box). We were just walking home from school. The weather had turned sunny and dry for a whopping two days (is that a record for western Oregon in April?), and in the gutter just off the sidewalk lay a dehydrated and crispy worm.

Worms are probably tied with cows and lions as Lilly's favorite animal. Ever since I took her out in the driveway during a rainstorm to look at them wiggling across the driveway, she's been looking for them every time we go outside. Since our front yard looks like we are recreating the landscape of Europe during WWI, complete with trenches and foxholes, there are plenty of opportunities to see the slimy pink creatures lurking in the earth.

Despite looking like a RonCo food dehydrator experiment gone wrong, the worm in the gutter still caught Lilly's eye, and over she went, bending down to try and pick it up. It crumbled like a mummy at her first touch before I could haul her back onto the sidewalk.

"Worm?" she asked, sounding somewhat puzzled.

"Yes, sweetie, that's a worm. But he's dead." Those words kind of caught in my throat. Dead. I was talking with my toddler about death. She's nineteen-months old, for goodness sake. Granted, it was just the death of a worm. But even as an adult who understands that death is a natural part of life, this kind of choked me up. That worm could have been Lilly's buddy. For her, a worm is a friend, something to be cherished, and admired, and greeted whenever she sees one. And that worm was never coming back from from its blacktop tomb.

Yet there it lay. And here I was, trying to figure out on the fly what to say to my little one about the shriveled carcass lying in front of us. I know that even if I had explained what "dead" meant she wouldn't have understood, but somehow, that conversation seemed too mature, too difficult, to real to have on the sidewalk on a warm April day. But I didn't want to lie either, to cop out and tell her the worm was sleeping (the crispy sleep of a deep-fried raisin), to sugarcoat what was lying there in the road (yuck, makes me never really want to eat a sour gummy worm again).

So I took a breath and said the only thing I could come up with at the moment: "We don't touch dead things. They're icky."

"Worm icky" she repeated several times, and as we walked away, she twice looked over her shoulder and into the gutter.

And while teaching my child that we shouldn't touch dead things isn't a bad idea (gotta teach that personal hygiene before they contract e-bola from poking a pickled rat gizzard with their big toe), it felt like the easy way out.

So when the sunflowers presented themselves in a similarly compromised state, rather than cover up the truth, I, at least, said the "d" word tempered with the optimism that Mommy could make it right. And make it right I did. By the time we arrived home on Tuesday afternoon, the seedlings were standing upright and leaning toward the afternoon sun (or at least in the direction where the sun would have been if it had not been for those dastardly rainclouds).

Yet sometime in the near future, she'll be big enough, old enough, smart enough to know that Mommy can't always work miracles. Then I'll have to find the courage to say more than "dead things are icky," or "maybe they're not dead," or “the kitty must have run away" (or, for you Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? fans, "r-u-n-n-o-f-t") . And while I could just stick in a VHS copy of The Lion King and have Timone and Pumba help explain the circle of life ('cause I don't think that South Park is really going to work on this one, especially since that damn Kenny keeps getting killed and rises again in the next episode), I know that too will not work. It's a conversation that, I must admit, I am not really looking forward to—it’s probably in the top 10 discussions I'd rather not have with my daughter but must unless I want her to grow up sheltered, diseased, maladjusted, or knocked up.

But as long as I can remember to water those seeds, maybe it's a conversation I can put on hold for another few weeks, right?