I might be the only ‘adult’ person in the world to love dandelions. I understand that they’re weeds, and they kill grass. I know that they poke your bare feet, and I know that they’re a weed because you can’t plant them, they plant themselves.
They are more beautiful to me than most flowers. Their little yellow heads are amazingly cheerful, and even as they die and turn into fragile white puffs – they’re still precious and lovely. You can make dandelion tea out of them, use them as impromptu make-up, and they even have some medicinal properties.
You can’t pick a dandelion unless you’re going to use it immediately, because they die faster than other flowers. That happy little yellow puffball turns limp and brown almost immediately. A smart scientist, instead of coming up with more and more ways to kill dandelions, would figure out a way to grow them without spikes, or make less of their seeds viable (and that’s only if you didn’t want them all around).
I used to have an acre of land with tons of dandelions. Try as I might to avoid it, it still needed mowing every 10 days or so. Chopping off all those dandelion heads seemed kind of depressing at first, but… within hours, they’d be back, raising their heads again to say hello to the bright sun.
A dandelion might be just an obnoxious weed to most people. But they’re survivors. Just like the person reading this, and just like the person writing this. We didn’t choose where we grew up, or how a lot of things happened – but we can choose whether to stick our heads up out of the ground and show the very best sides of ourselves – or not to.
Come on Dandelion – this summertime is all yours.
All love,
Rosie
