Lawn and Order
My daughter tells of the time she decided she hated dandelions. She was in her teens and wanted to go to the beach with her girlfriends. I was still in the newlywed phase of my second marriage and we had moved into a new home. My husband decided my daughter should spend time pulling dandelions from the yard before going to the beach. This was a source of frustration for her on a number of levels…there had been a pre-nuptial agreement between my husband and children that he was not to be “a parent.” He was to give and get respect, but not order them to do things. Telling her she couldn’t leave until she pulled a quota of dandelions smacked of parent-like behavior. In addition, the 1,000 dandelions per square foot of yard felt a bit like using an eye-dropper to drain a lake. And that was a reminder that she wasn’t at the lake. Grrrr. My daughter was irritated and took it out on the poor misunderstood flowers. For years she would bring the story up when she was describing futility. “It’s about as pointless as the time Tad made me pull dandelions out of the yard. They came right back, you know.”
The irony? She is now a homeowner with a lawn full of dandelions of her very own. She recently confessed that she and her boytoy LOVE to sit in the yard and pull them out. It is their version of happy hour—a way to unwind and converse after a long day of technology and meeting fatigue. Funny how time brings perspective. Ah, the circle of life. It is dandy, and I’m not lie’n.
You are a very smart individual!
Hey! I know what would be a really good waste of time. Let’s hire some guys to work full-time ciodldng and mowing it to 1/4 length so it’s no good for anything not grazing, not even slowing down rain. They’ll devote maybe 1/3 of their time to killing nutritious edibles. And the other horrors of trying to maintain a billiard-like green lawn putting out nematicide pellets that get eaten by birds, so you have to put them pellets out really early in the morning so you can pick up the dead birds before customers arrive. That one’s outlawed now. Anyway, I think what I’m trying to say is, Word to dandelions.