When she plants her first seeds – sunflowers she doesn’t realize will tower over her roof – she’s horrified to learn she must cull the shoots. She reads the seed packet multiple times; this can’t be right. But no, it is clearly written on the back: when the seeds sprout, they must be thinned.
Not more than 10 days submerged, delicate green stems burst forth, tiny leaves clinging to the vines. Religiously, she checks the patch, thrilled at this collection of new life; she’d half believed nothing would sprout.
Now, with her little patch a reality, she will return to the back of that seed packet again and again. She’s incredulous. Surely, not just as her little stems flourish, must she yank them out! What injustice, the disruption of this community. She doesn’t understand why, if all sprout, can they not all thrive? For days she debates; she doubts. How can she possibly bring herself to kill any of these plants she started?
In the end, it is fear that gets her. Fear that if she doesn’t follow the instructions, all those tiny vines will die, and then what will she be left with? So, a few days late, she just does it. Works up her nerve to approach the patch and then, barely looking at each hole, lets her fingers blindly stumble on stems and quickly yanks them up, apologizing as she pulls roots from the dirt.

The survivors thrive.

In October, after reaching well over ten feet, their centers drooping heavily with oil black seeds, she will bring them down. She will be astonished at the thickness of their stalks, her branch shears inadequate to cut through their fibrous trunks. In the end, she has to dig them out of the ground, heaving her weight onto a shovel to angle and pry the roots out of the ground. She lines them against her fence, these massive brown bases looking more like miniature tree trunks than sunflower stalks. She had no idea their roots could grow so deep, so big.
.
A few years later, she’ll think of her little garden, the seasons of sun-worshipping flowers. She’ll consider her last fourteen months, frayed relationships strewn about her like those nascent vines she had to pry loose. How easily those little shoots gave way. She reminds herself that, without that culling, there would never have been enough room for all those gargantuan stalks to root and grow and blossom. These relationships, she wants to say this is different, that she is not the one plucking the threads of friendship and connection and yet –

What she grows now is different, plants that don’t need much beyond soil transfer and water. Those hearty, prebloomed flowers at any garden store – snap dragons, pansies. Perhaps it’s a relief, this simpler garden. Now she doesn’t have the responsibility to decide that which flourishes and that which does not.