I grew up in Florida, in an old house with a lot of windows. Lizards liked to cling to the window screens. And sometimes, a lizard would manage to make its way between the screen and the window and come inside. If the lizard did not find his way back outside soon enough, if he got lost in a closet or under a bed, he would fade from bright green or brown, to a ghostly white. Once this happened, the lizard was slower and less certain and it was easy for me to catch him, to cup him in my hands and carry him outside and let him go.
Last week, at a friend’s cabin up north thousands of miles away from that house in Florida, I dreamed of catching ghost lizards. In the dream, when I bent down to put the lizard on the ground, he would turn himself, somehow, into a sunflower.
It was an odd and deeply satisfying dream: lizard after lizard transformed itself before my eyes. I kept going back into the house to rescue another lizard and then another and another. And soon, there was a whole field of nothing but sunflowers.

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