Sunday, April 03, 2005

My worst freakin' nightmare:


When I was a kid, I never understood what my father had against dandelions. I thought they were pretty. And when they were done being pretty, they'd get all fuzzy headed, and that was when the fun began; that was when you could blow on them with every last bit of breath in your tiny body in a quixotic effort to free every single seedling and watch them float away. (Your wish only came true if you blew them all off, and even though I had quite the set of pipes when I was eight, I was never able to get every last one. Alas.) My father always had a fit when I did that. He liked to keep his yard a pristine green of unbroken lines mowed into the lawn, just like Yankee Stadium.

Now I own my own home, which includes a lovely landscaped garden, which is under attack. When we first moved in, I spent three days clearing those little yellow fuckers out of our lovely but somewhat negelcted garden. It took some serious work, because each nasty little cluster of leaves has a nefariously long tap root that's got to be dug out or they pop right back up. I swear those things are trying to reach right down to the depths of HELL from whence they came, and they hold on so tight to the earth so that even when you've scraped your hands raw trying to get at them in the tiny crack between the lovely landcaped rocks where the little bastards have dug in, they snap off at the top half of the root and shake their ugly little serrated leaves at you in laughter, because like the Hydra they will just grow their heads back, and like Sisyphus you will be out there THE VERY NEXT DAY digging at the same fershlugginer root.

I guess everyone's got to have a hobby, though.

3 Comments:

Blogger Jan said...

I'm *so* hoping your cousin Nora doesn't feel this way about dandelions. I've already promised her an herb garden (that sounds like a novel title--thank heavens that herbs are much easier to keep happy than roses), but I've fought the battle with the Yellow-Headed Guerillas before, and I know that humans have as much chance of winning that as Napoleon had of conquering Spain. Turn it all into a devastated wasteland, and the little botanical freedom fighters will still be ambushing your convoys and overrunning your depots.

10:00 AM  
Anonymous mjt said...

Perhaps you should look at them as nature's free vegetables. Pick the leaves small, lest they get bitter. They make a lovely stew--email and I will give you the recipe.

I will never forget the sight of my mother picking dandelions in my Durham backyard several Easters ago.

9:44 AM  
Anonymous rayn said...

You know they make a special tool for that. (We used to have a long one you could use standing up, even.)

I would add that they are better than the dirt patches that constitute my yard, which look especially bad since my neighbors on either side have chemical-green yards.

10:12 AM  

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