A rare sunny spring day at our cottage on the Olympic Peninsula, I walk up the hill and through the wooded path to the adjacent space that includes my hopeful vegetable garden, a small frog pond and a field of what was meant to be grass below four fruit trees. Today, the grass serves as a green canvas for an abundant peppering of dandelions, seemingly more sun-yellow this year. They rival the sun itself, an in-my-face yellow that wins me over with joy for their prevalence, weed-reviled as they are. Prime in their moment, I imagine their demise to fluffy seed balls the wind will scoop up and shake out and reseed in resurrection. As children, we speeded the seeding by picking a large puff ball and blowing the white effervescence until it rained with whiteness, an act motivated by power and plenty, but always uplifting with joy. Who cannot love a dandelion? Yet today, my meditation on their yellowness is disturbed by the growling John Deere mower moving up the hill to level them all within minutes of their glory. I am resigned. My husband loves a flat and green lawn as sterile as a golf course. Or is it his glee in riding high on the cushioned seat of the big John Deere while its whirring blades shave the upper lawn of dandelions, clover and moss?
I turned my back on the devastation, opening the gate to my garden to discern if any vegetables, whose seeds I planted two weeks ago, are surviving. The temperatures were still equinox cold at night, and rain predicted almost daily when I decided to borrow from the early spring light and put in rows of spinach, lettuce, arugula, radish, kale and beets. Having loosened the garden soil and mounded rows for each, I gently planted each seed an appropriate distance from the next, patted a little soil on each row and covered all with a diaphanous cloth that serves like a greenhouse, allowing in only warm sun and easy rain. In today’s sunlight I raised the cloth with a Christmas present hopefulness that I might spy a thin line of green venturing through the garden soil. Voila! Radishes boast boldly as the dandelions. Although timid and circumspect, spinach germinated in thin lines like new grass. What a marvelous start to a gardening year. Surely there will be leaves of lettuce and crisp bites of radish for salad days in June. I felt a “Look what I am growing” pride. Gardeners do that, you know. We are a boastful bunch, hosting garden parties in early summer, or carrying bunches of kale to our neighbors. We dd it. We planted, fertilized and watered our abundance.
Yet, I cannot dispel that image of lawn-dotted dandelions planted perhaps by birds, but more likely by wind-blown fluff. Why do I celebrate what is cultivated more than what is wild? In April, there is nothing that better signals resurrection than the trillium flower. One trillium returns each year smack dab in our cedar-chipped trail on the way to the treehouse. We welcome it like an expected house guest, marking its space with a circle of stones so we can find it early the next year and avoid discouraging its return with a pile of newly spread cedar chips. Why did it grow there? Or why along the way to the woodpile are three thriving trillium that would go unnoticed were it not for our trips to fetch logs for the woodstove? They start as white flowers in the shape of a cross, so I associate them with Easter. As weeks spill into spring, the white moves from pink to vermillion. I would have a flower border of trillium if one could seed these flowers, but no, they rise where they want to rise. They surprise us as we walk through the woods, for the blossoms may peak under branches felled by winter wind.
Every season I feel the political pull between taking credit for creation and being surprised at what Earth created with no contribution on my part. At best, the contribution could be that I left undisturbed a patch of lawn. Perhaps I once planted them (I cannot recall), but every spring in a narrow flower border below a bird bath, checkered lilies sprout. Their stems are thin as a chive. Its head bended as in prayer, a delicate lavender and white checkered lily. Sometimes there are only a couple of blooms. This year there were four. I am surprised and delighted as one receiving a birthday gift, though that date is two months away. In the autumn when Seattle’s rain returns in regular earnestness, I often find on the parking strip at least one amanita mushroom. Deep red with spots like the shell of a ladybug – but bigger – they are the image of mushrooms depicted in story books, mushrooms that serve as umbrellas for dwarfs. Amanitas are hallucinogenic, and unless boiled down, likely poisonous. Like the dandelion, their reputation suffers with no respite from their beauty.
As soon as I spotted that yard of dandelions, I knew I wanted them to launch my next blog in Thoughts After Seventy, (now Eighty). though I had no idea how I would relate the little flowers to thoughts worth blogging. Now I reread and realize. These days, as old age insists that I recognize her, my thoughts often drift to what I can still create and what I am given. Purpose seems as random as those aging dandelions, their white fluff blown to the wind.
Mary's Room With a View 