Last week, our neighbor's lawn was covered in dandelions. My seven-year-old daughter caught a glimps as we drove past and shouted "Wow! Look at all the flowers! How come we don't have any flowers on our grass?" I started explaining that those "flowers" were actually "weeds," and we really didn't want them on our lawn, but couldn't bring myself to even finish the sentence. Leave it to a seven-year-old to make you question the place of human beings in the ecosystem, deciding which plants (and birds and other animals) are "good ones" and which ones we had the right to exterminate just because they inconvenience us.
Like my friend Marques Bovre sang:
Well I tried to be normal, I mowed my lawn,
‘Til considering the dandelion.
How it pushed right on from dusk to dawn.
How it paid my plans no mind.
How the dandelion paid no mind,
To the poison Green Machine.
It couldn’t be confined inside my lines,
Painting yellow on my green.
Dandelion, dandelion, color of the sunshine.
Any friend of dandelionís is a friend of mine.
Dandelion, dandelion, makes a mighty fine wine.
And you do to me and mine, what you do to dandelion.
Sure, I put some weed and feed on the lawn last week. But I have to admit I was more than a little happy to see some dandelions popping up the other day.