“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” my friend giggled as i tightly shut my eyes and filled my cheeks with air. “My dad would KILL us if he saw this going down in his front yard.”
“Why?!” I stopped mid blow, dropped my dandelion to my side, and looked at her in disbelief.
“Because once we blow these, twenty million more dandelions are going to grow in our front yard!!” she exclaimed. I rolled my eyes and squeezed them tight and blew my wishes across her perfectly manicured lawn. She laughed and did the same.
I’ll never forget the day my mother told me dandelions weren’t flowers. And not just that, its worse. They are lower on the scale than simply just not being good enough to be considered a flower. They are weeds. Annoying, over populated, pestering, infectious weeds, that you cannot seem to eradicate no matter how often you mow your lawn, or how often you spray weedkiller.
My face sank that day as my “bouquet” of yellow and white wilted as I held it out in offering to my mom. She gave me a reassuring smile and told me it didn’t matter to her if they were real flowers, she loved them anyways.
I find it ironic that everyone wants the pretty flowers that you have to work hard to make grow. The kind you have to water, and plant in just the right amount of sunlight. The kind I always end up getting poisen ivy while planting, and that I can never seem to keep alive longer than a week. But no one wants the infectious flower, the pretty yellow that grows on its own, and spreads to everyone it touches, and even leaves magic after it dies.
Maybe we’ve got it all backwards.
As I left her house I plucked another and brought it to my face. I wished to be like the infectious flower, who leaves a little magic and touches people even after I’m gone.
