Back When

Fresh spring grass swelled a blaze of yellow rosettes like confetti spread across the earth’s floor. To many folks they are nothing but a spike in the side, a galling annoyance, a grub.

To me the Dandelion is more than just a weed.

Memories of warm sunshine filled days of love as a child running barefoot across the cool soft grass below my feet to gather the golden bouquet. Digging into the fresh clay soil painted dirt across hands and under nails, left a dark ring of soil around the bath. Picking the bright yellow blossoms a bouquet for Mom. Plucking the crisp edible greens for dinner she’d boil with thin slices of salted pork, later drowning in butter on the dinner plate.

Dandelions left behind soaking in the sun morphed orb-shaped heads of a wooly cluster of seeds many wishes were made upon, as we delicately nipped the lower stem filled with its milky fluid looking upward toward the heavens, we’d make a wish and blow the gauzy cluster to the sky.

To me the Dandelion is more than just a weed.