Seeing the Flowers

I fell in love yesterday. With dandelions. This will sound very strange to you who do battle with these annoying yellow flowers that threaten to consume lawns every spring. I understand that feeling as I am one who has been sent to do battle on numerous occasions by my head of house. In fact, weeding is one of the few things she knows I will do well becuase I tend to kill all the flowers I'm involved with. It's just not a good situation.

After spending part of the morning in the sun and eliminating all the yellow that threatened the green on Wednesday, I was so upset to see the next morning that there was more yellow than there had been when I started the day before. This may have been because my back and legs still hurt from beheading all the small flowers. I noticed that there was more yellow in the park than there had been the day before as well. I voiced some complaint to a friend while sitting in the park and he replied that the yellow makes it more colorful and pretty. I hadn't noticed that before.

Dandelions are actually flowers. The only reason we consider them to be weeds is that they appear where we don't want them to be. That is actually fairly close to the definition of a weed. I love watching little children picking dandelions and putting them into a bouquet for their mothers. They haven't yet been taught that dandelions are bad and should be avoided. They think they are pretty and make wishes on the seeds. I still make wishes too. That's one of the great things about dandelions for me. Just another chance to wish.

I looked out into the backyard yesterday and saw yellow. Not as much as the lawn had just been cut, but enough. The park has even more. And it looked pretty. I know that they aren't supposed to be there, but they are. And as many times we battle them, they never really seem to go away. I don't even think that's such a bad thing anymore. If they did, what would we make wishes on? What flowers would we be able to pick without fear of reprisal? Where would the color with the green come from?

We can see the weeds when we look at the lawn, or we can see the possibilities, the random chance that led to more beauty. We can see them as something that has to be removed or a blessing that we are lucky to have been given. For me, I'm going to stop looking for the weeds and start seeing the flowers. They are much more beautiful.