We have survived another season of dandelions. They have flowered and gone to seed, and after the next mowing we will forget about them until next spring. This year I escaped with one blister from digging them out of the lawn.
Clara got no blisters. Clara adopted us as grandparents for an hour at the playground and let us babysit her bunny doll as we sat on a bench and she she played on the roundabout and the slides. She gave us a dandelion flower plucked from among thousands at the park to use as bunny food.
When is a dandelion a weed? This Wikipedia article explains how the entire plant is edible. Now that the world food supply is under threat from human activity, (war, climate change, floods. drought, loss of pollinators, the rising cost of fuel and fertilizer) it makes you think. When you can't buy bread, lunch is waiting outside the front door for free, rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre, low in carbs and fats, no expensive marketing or packaging, no fertilizer, no transportation costs, no sweat, no worries. The dandelion is also a diuretic, a coffee substitute, a dye, a source of rubber that may be useful in road surfacing if you insist on yet another road.
One more use for dandelions: they are a great analogy for ideas. Some ideas we like. They become our creed. The ones for which we have no use are discarded like a weed. In the tradition of my grandparents, we settled on the primary importance of people. Love God and love your neighbour as yourself. Other things are either of use to us or problems for us, or are just taking up space. Equally venerable yet more humble and inclusive thoughts from other cultures have been rooted out and discarded as primitive paganism, the religion of peasants and savages. Now our anthropocentrism has got us into trouble. We discover that we are a small, dependent component of a larger reality. When we have used it up and we are gone, dandelions will be there waiting for the next smart, self-centred, self-limiting evolutionary experiment to get blisters making yard waste.
Can I get you some water?
or an "invasive species"?
ReplyDeleteGuilty. I was born about the time penicillin became available. I can't take credit for antibiotics but they have saved my life more than once. During my lifetime there has been a tripling of the population of my species. I remain a +1 in that count, so I participated in the invasion. Dandelions, move over.
ReplyDelete