Gathering Thoughts On an Evening Walk in Spring

I've always liked dandelions.

Despite their bad reputation as weeds, I liked them because they were the one flower I could consistently identify from a young age, and because of their colour. Yellow. Like little tiny starbursts, a whole field of them was bright and shiny and seemed to beckon me to go running in them, to lie down and watch clouds for the whole afternoon.

And even when they weren't yellow anymore, when they had undergone that mysterious transformation from starbursts to white-haired balls, even then I liked them. They may have lost their joyous colour, but now I could send them off into the wind, blowing my wish away along with a puff of seeds. People used to tell me not to blow dandelions, that that only caused the weed to spread, but I couldn't understand how this was a bad thing.

(Weeds. It's a funny sort of classification, isn't it? As far as I can tell, in the plant world, you get labelled a "weed" if you grow quickly, propogate widely, and can take over the territory of other plants. And yet in the human world, those very same traits are labelled entirely differently: "Colonisation". "Success". "Virility". "Industry".)

As I grew older, I'm sad to say I had less and less time for playing in the dandelion fields. I still admired them as I went walking, but the careful contemplation that can only happen in childhood was gone. It's been ages since I popped the head off of one (I can't even remember the vaguely obscene song that one sang before this cruel beheading), or dusted off the light pollen on my fingers, or squeezed out the delicate milky sap for intense scientific scrutiny.

But today, on a nightly walk after a day of desultory rain, I noticed something new and entirely fascinating about this "weed". Normally delicate cotton balls of fluffy, carefully distinct seeds, the dandelions had been sent into total disarray by the rain. Like a wet cat, the fluffy seeds which normally sailed through the air had all clumped together on the stalk, turning what was usually a Eisteinian afro into a spiny mace-like ball. These seeds, weighed down by water, wouldn't be sailing off to new and fertile ground anytime soon.

At first I thought it was sad -- the whole propogation mechanism of this hardy plant had been ruined by a little rain. But then my metaphorical mind kicked in ( and do excuse me if I get too anthropomorphic or too overt -- I've had an odd sort of day). Faced with adversity, with painful missiles dropping from on high, the tiny seeds literally stick together. They may not look as pretty, but their clumping into tiny bundles saved them from being swept away all together. They managed to hang on by hanging on to each other.

And tomorrow is a new day. If more rain comes, the dandelion can handle it. But if (oh wonder of wonders!) the sun comes out once more, then slowly the seeds will dry out. They'll seperate from one another -- not entirely, but enough to stand proudly on their own again. Soon they'll return to their usual state of fluffy allure, waiting for someone or something to come along and blow them to a new home.