I’ve been looking for them every morning, but they aren’t here. I know they’ll be here soon, and I miss them. Seeing their fuzzy sweet faces means that summer is nearly here. They’re like the robins, or the lilacs. But these sweet little darlings - well, they’ve taken up permanent residence in my heart with their fluffy yellow faces and beautifully bending graceful leaves. This morning I woke up and looked out the back window and there they were - my friends! My dandelions! Finally. It’s been a long, long winter. Gray, white, pale, dark. Just like my heart during those long stretches when it wouldn’t be warmer than 0 and the sun refused to push through the clouds.
But today the sky is blue, the breeze is gentle and warm, the little white clouds are high and sparse. The grass has grown long and I walk back to the garden patch and see them - a cluster of giant dandelions rising out of last summer’s lawn clippings. I bend down and look at the biggest flower. Soft white hairs are growing on the stem, and the leaves are almost a foot long. I lightly touch the top of the flower and feel its energy and vitality and I breathe its yellowness into me. I breathe in the newness that grows out of the nothingness. I breathe in the promise of sun and warmth. I breathe in the healing. I am so grateful I think I may cry, but I don’t. I look for the greenest leaves and pull off about 20 from all of the plants and thank the dandelions then walk into the house. Can I eat them? We haven’t sprayed in over 10 years, but the neighbors do. I don’t want to eat weed killer. I wash the leaves and eat one, 1 minute fresh. It’s sour, really sour, and I have a hard time swallowing it. I remember that some think the dandelion is a weed that must be sprayed, pulled, destroyed. But to me the dandelion is beautiful and necessary to us, then I think of how many other things in life are the same - we assume something’s bad and try to kill it, but is it really bad?
Whether it’s someone else’s religion or political belief or some part of your body, or a thought. If we think it’s bad, we try to kill it. Spray it with our cloak of denial poison. We’re highly trained exterminators, but we can never really kill the dandelions, can we? Every year they come back, and I hold my breath waiting for them every year, thankful they are strong enough not to listen to us as we hurl insults at them. They know what they are, and I think they know how much I love them.