“Why don’t you plant the sunflowers in the boxes too?” Dean asks. “Lead.” “What?” “They used to put lead in everything,” Sandy says. “Gasoline, paint, bullets, everything. So the soil around most old buildings is totally full of it. Levels so high that you can’t grow a lot of stuff to eat safely and it’s not as safe for little kids to be playing in. But sunflowers help pull it out of the soil.” “They do?” “Yep,” she says. “I mean, you have to plant generations and generations of them. It takes a long time. I won’t be around to see it. But one day the lead will be gone.”
a ribbon of concrete: chapter twenty-four
