Some people hate dandelions to the point of waging (hapless)
war against them. This is something I’ve never understood. Dandelions are hardy
and sunny. They’re among the first blooms to pop up each spring, when nature’s
palette is quite bland, and will propagate well into summer, after other (less resilient)
blooms have arrived to fill the landscape with color. Whether it’s a single
dandelion smiling upward along the front porch or an entire field of them
reaching for the sun, they seem happy flowers.
Plus, when they’re done blooming, those sunny disks
transform into wonderful, orbicular seed puffs. I don’t care how old you are, blowing
into those puffs to watch them disperse seems irresistible. Unless, I suppose,
you’re one of the people at war with dandelions.
For a few summers during my Colorado tenure, I worked mowing
lawns for a friend’s company. Mostly, we took care of vacation homes – giant houses
used for only a few weeks of the year and kept pristine for all the other weeks.
There was one house, on “The Bench” overlooking town, whose owners rarely (if
ever) visited during summer. But they insisted every dandelion hiding in their
lawn be plucked or poisoned.
I couldn’t understand the painstaking search-and-destroy
missions we conducted every week. The people were never there to SEE the dandelions.
And the thing about dandelions in lawns is that when you mow the grass, the
flowers get lopped off, and everything is just green; you wouldn’t know the
dandelions were even there unless you really looked.
Of course, I don’t welcome dandelions in the garden and pull
them up using the special dandelion-digging tool that reaches deep into the
ground to – hopefully – extract the entire root, lest it re-sprout. But I leave
the rest of them alone.
I don’t eat the dandelions – root, leaf, or flower – like some
folks do. Nor do I use them medicinally or ferment the blossoms into wine. I
just like how they look – bright, happy, undeterred by the mixed feelings they
instill in humans.
Especially this year, when spring has been slow to settle in,
and sunshine frustratingly fleeting, I’m glad to see the dandelions and their golden
happiness spreading through the greening fields. If I close my eyes and turn my
face toward the spring sunshine, I can picture my children, when they were very
small, handing me bouquets of what some would disdainfully call weeds.
Those were some of the sweetest flowers I’ve ever received.
Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the May 24, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.