Moldova is well known for it's sunflowers. The country is filled with these flowers. The range and scope of this, one of their primary exports, is wide. It is not uncommon to find them nestled in gardens bearing just a few of the majestic stems, while conversely vast fields full of the yellow flowers are found all over this small country. In summer one doesn't have to walk far to find these flowers.
Luckily for me, the sunflower is probably my favorite flower. They are big, and bright, and have 'sun' in the name. That's a happy flower, if you ask me. In the heat of summer the saving grace of many of my 'rutiera' rides (as mentioned earlier, these are the vans the shuttle people throughout all of Moldova) was the view of these fields, rushing by my window, creating a storybook-like yellow blur.
Now that the weather has begun to cool, and the most temperature sensitive crops have come and gone, we enter the season of fall. I love fall, nothing better than a long walk on a cool afternoon, munching an apple and enjoying the colors of the leaves about to fall from the trees. With fall comes the end of sunflower season.
In the US we import nearly everything we consume. This is a pretty well accepted statement. And so, I hate to admit it, but I have only ever seen sunflower seeds in the cute little pouches one buys at the grocery store. At Shaws, one can buy them in fun flavors or 'classic salted', great for a day at a baseball game or a BBQ.
My ignorance of the lineage of the sunflower seed all changed this week. On Wednesday I was sitting outside munching on my lunch of crushed sauteed vegetables and bread, when I heard what sounded like a hammer hitting a paperback book. I asked host mom 'what's going on over at the neighbors house'. She didn't need to look before responding 'sunflowers'. I gave her my oh-I-have-never-seen-that-before look, mixed with my I-would-really-like-to-go-help/watch-what-is-happening-because-I'm-an-ignorant-American look. She gave me her I'm-busy-right-now-I'm-going-to-ignore-your-look-because-I-don't-have-time-for-this look. And so, the subject was dropped and I returned to my lunch.
I had forgotten about it by Thursday when she came to my room and said 'let's go'. I often don't know where we are going, but I trust her, so I get up and put on a sweatshirt. We walk to the neighbors house and sure enough I find my answer to the question I had posed a day earlier. A pile, my knee high, of sunflower seeds had been whacked out of sunflowers. Both the women sitting at the pile had a glove on one had and a block of wood in the other. I was quickly escorted to a stool and handed a fancy mallet with a hand grip that had been carved in. I was wearing sports shorts which were deemed inappropriate for the work (now I understood why host mom had told me to put on pants, and I didn't listen...typical of me). A bolt of fabric, once a skirt, was tucked around my waste and into the back of my shorts. I watched as the baba (grandma) sat with her feet fully submerged in the seeds, like sitting in a sand pile at the beach, hammering away at these sunflowers.
I decided this was fun. I grabbed the biggest sunflower I could find and started whacking away. I got a few funny looks from the baba, but no one complained because the seeds were falling out-- and that is the point. After smacking away at a few flowers my arm began to feel fatigued, and the glamor of the simplicity of this new experience began to wear off. Host mom kept looking over and asking if I was tired. Of course I responded 'no', I wasn't going to let some old baba beat me at sunflower seed shucking. Yes, that was childish of me, but I really will do anything for a competition, whether my competitors know who they are, or not. So, there we sat for the next couple of hours smacking sunflowers until the all the sacks had been emptied, all the flowers had been de-seeded and all the light had drained from the sky.
Later, as I got ready for bed a few seeds dropped out of my pony tail. They weren't 'a fun flavor' or 'classic salted' but they tasted fresh, and natural. It was a simple way to finish my day.
I will miss the yellow.
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