Dandelions, white and green. Their stems are straight and tall but their heads are round and soft. They sit next to little yellow flowers with frilly ends. I thought they were different species that are different from one another but they are the same. In the life cycle of those flowers, the frilly yellow ones, the dandelions are only lingering ghosts of the sunny, yellow pedals they used to shine when they were younger. Now only a dandelion remains, waiting to be blown away like dust and disappear as all things do eventually.
They say if you blow on them and let each seed dissipate in the wind, that whatever you wish for will come true. I have tried many times to blow out each dandelion infructescence but I have never been able to do so in one try. When this happens, your wish has not worked and it cannot be granted. It always disappointed me then, like I had missed my one chance at my one wish, and now it would not come true. Still, I would blow on it a few more times, but a few of the white puffs still lingered, clinging on to their home flower, like they were not yet ready to disappear. In capitulation, I’d pluck those off with my fingers and drop the green stem back to the ground. The stark realization that none of my wishes would come true that day. And why should they?
When I was a child, there were yellow buttercups that sprouted in our backyard every summer. All the neighborhood kids would pluck them from the ground and hold one under their neighbor’s chin. “If it glows, that means you like butter,” they all said. The golden light cast its own shadow on their skin, underneath their chin. I can’t remember now the last time someone tried to see if I liked butter, but I’d bet it was a long time ago.
I wonder if those flowers still sprout on my lawn. I don’t see why they shouldn’t but I no longer live there, and although I visit, it has been too long of a time since I last checked. As we grow older, those flowers and dandelions become ghosts forgotten behind everything else. We step on them now, just like we plucked them then, forgetting they are living until they are not.
My landlord was mowing the lawn just yesterday, and he paid no mind to the taraxacum or the buttercup flowers. The grass must be trimmed, so that houses look nice and you are not judged by your neighbor. This is the colonization of land. This is how we have dominated nature. This is all that we know. And despite these irreversible effects we have cast on nature, we still torment her. We use her and defile her because she can give us what we need but she is running out. She will become a ghost like the rest of us. We are all doomed to the same fate.