I’m sitting at home sick right now, playing the utterly-without-decency PS3 game Lollipop Chainsaw (and loving it, by the way). I just got up to put something in the oven for lunch and noticed something in our back yard.
But first, a little backstory. The other day I went for a long walk to scout out an area suitable for launching rockets (as suggested by yesterday’s tweet, and which will be tomorrow’s blog entry). On my walk I noticed a certain yellow flower abundant in some lawns but not others. Upon arriving home, I was happy to see that so far our lawn was free.
I speak, of course, of dandelions.
Anyone with any sort of lawn will have an opinion of these guys, and it is rarely good. They come from nowhere seemingly overnight, and are an ugly, ugly plant (and flower) that stakes a claim on your lawn that lasts for a few weeks. They are the hydras of the plant world: cut off a stalk and find two the next day.
Where there were none in our back yard two days ago there are now hundreds.
As a child I loved dandelions. We called them wet-your-beds because, as every kid knows, if you handle them you (won’t!) wet your bed the next night. I handled them often, since I had a bizarre kids love of using the latex that leaks from their broken stalks like white blood as a glue. Try it one day: tear open a dandelion and glue your palms together using the white stuff. Childish fun 🙂
For all of their ugliness and for as much as I don’t want them on my lawn I can’t deny that when they seed they become quite special. I still can’t resist kicking the ‘puff’ and watching the seeds disperse in the wind, even as I know I am just dooming my lawn for the next year.
As I said to a woman on my walk the other day, in the war against dandelions, I simply let them win.
