Maybe it’s really true that only 2 kinds of people exist… they who see dandelions as delightful and they who regard them as an eyesore.

Coming at last into his own suburban streets, the young man shifted his sac to the other shoulder. Kale leaf and eggplants, a loaf of apple pecan bread, his prizes from the weekend farm market. The first road, an artery, was straining to walk for a few hundred meters. Houses of dentists and lawn statues and SUV cadillacs purchased in some kindless livelihood. But it was the people on their lawns these fine springtime leisure days, that pricked him like nettles, not their finery. Without fail two or three would be grim-faced in labor, not caring or aware another passed. For this was the season of dandelion wars! Those miserable scourges, infections, and eyesores, littering their architected grassy trophy expanses. With tools rare and special-built, from catalogs only mailed to the wealthy, they honed their technique with a militaristic purposefulness. Plucking deep to the roots, assaulting the yellow cancer, their faces molded in the scowl of battle, the disgust of righteous hatred. Sometimes also an innocent child, forced to witness the slaughter, stood near with a soft rake for collecting the carcass mass. Seemingly every third home was engaged in this warfare at any given Peace Grove St. moment, their owners cursing bitterly the resourceful repopulating of the unruly invaders since but 48 hours. A relentless mockery of their propriety. The ones not on the front lines, meanwhile, were perusing the Home Depot aisles for chemical weapons that might equalize their chances. Right next to the plaster gnomes with red hats and the fake metal wheelbarrows with one support beam artfully misshapen.

But soon, he arrived at his own inconsequential side road, and walked in sudden peace, hearing birdsong and children’s laughter. And there, the fourth on the left, his cozy abode. He pauses outside beneath a crab apple tree and sits on a cushion of recently fallen pink blossoms. And gazes contented across the modest green acreage, so beautifully and densely adorned with the yellow of dandelions bursting their gift sunwards, and the occasional mysterious purple of wildflowers only healthy grasses’ soil can manifest.

_______RS

[ Image: detail of a photo from an article about the declining fate of nursing homes during Covid. ]

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