Dandelion

At the moment there are no tenants in the student rental across the street, and the front lawn is unmowed.  But since the last time I looked at it, something has happened: along with the high grass are dandelions, lots of them.  Now I notice that they are on the fringes of our front lawn as well.

Dandelions were the flowers of my childhood--dandelions and violets and a few others that occupy the area between wildflowers and weeds in the current view of such things.  Other flowers belonged to adults, who grew them, pampered and discussed them, and praised them, making them sources of individual pride.  We children therefore were warned to stay clear of them.  We were never to run in their flowerbeds, or pick them, or even get close to them.

Adults did not care about dandelions.  In fact, they regarded them as harbingers of disgrace if they appeared on the lawn.  Better a dead- looking brown crewcut lawn than a green one with too much yellow in it.  Scandalous!   Dandelionus! Out comes the heavy artillery power mowers of the neighborhood, shattering Sunday silence with the roar and whine of tank battalions on maneuvers.  (Well, by the 1960s anyway.)

But throughout my early childhood there was a field two lots long between my house and that of two of my pals, brothers who lived "next door."  Dandelions ruled there.  We could run through them, roll around in them, pick them, smell and taste them, play with them.  If we'd wanted we could have decorated bikes and hats with them, and disassembled them to make yellow checkers or hairy yellow eyes, and nobody would have cared.  We definitely did chase butterflies or lightning bugs through them, or just scrunched down to see them close-up, and regard the world through yellow caps.

The dandelions of my childhood in western Pennsylvania looked like those above.  Those on the lawns hereabouts are like this one, with a more defined center.   Their textures are slightly different, and they seem to have longer stems.  The California variety is more like other--or recognized-- California wildflowers.  The PA version seems scruffier. Or maybe I'm imagining that. But that's the one that lives in my childhood.