First light flows across carpet lawn, golden water flooding.
I stand where the kitchen’s two corner windows meet, and watch day rise. Soundlessly she comes across wheat’s emerald glades, sweeps up to island-house, settles in gilded glory.
And I cringe. This day He sends forth, she finds no petal strewn path, no lawns impeccably manicured. No, in this place we fete each new day with dandelions, loud and crass.
We’ve hacked, sprayed, mowed and plucked. Stubbornly, endlessly, they erupt, blazing molten from the earth’s bowels. These volcanoes defy extinguishing.
And a memory sparks too of a long ago walk down a gravel road with spring all gusting in.
My maternal grandmother, elegant, refined, steps jauntily along in her tightly laced shoes, her wide heel clipping over potholes. One long arm swings briskly, the other clutches her sweater flapping in kite-winds.
My sister, double dimples stitching cheeks, piggy-tales flying, skips along beside. Her short legs struggle to keep pace with Granny’s strides. Weary, little sister finally slows, wilts down into waving ditch grasses. There she sits content to lace lion necklaces. Granny will retrieve her on the way home.
It’s this that flashes every spring: Granny’s face contorting with disgust when little sister jumps onto roadside, festooning with a profusion of miniature suns. Lion drool stains her neck and hands. Granny’s voice stiffly declines the invitation to carry the bouquet home.
And when little sister leaves the bunch on the kitchen counter in hopes that Granny will find a vase, I stand in the dining room and watch her open the cupboard under the sink and quietly toss the mass of yellow into garbage can’s dark.
I’ve inherited a strong disdain for dandelions.
But there’s another legacy that could have been mine.
The man in the black-and-white photograph atop a cabinet in the living room would have smiled at this morning regaled on yellow carpet. Or so I’m told. Robert John Morton, my great-grandfather, died before I was born, my younger brother his namesake. It’s not hard to imagine that weathered man in the photograph, his leathery hands holding the reins of two Clydesdales, happily fancying dandelions. The pasture in which R.J. stands flashes with glaring sun-orbs.
My father tells the story every spring when terra firma bursts with fireballs.
“They were Grandpa R.J.’s favorite flower and he wasn’t ashamed to tell anyone that. And here we go waging war against them.” Dad’s work-furrowed hand pulls the peak of his cap lower. “Guess beauty is all in the eye of the beholder.”
Beauty depends on how you frame the world.
Like all other spring mornings that have gone before, I look out my window and frame this dandelion pimpled landscape with Granny’s disdain. It doesn’t have to be that way. I could choose Great-Grandpa R.J.’s frame for this day rising. For the man never saw dandelion weeds. Only regal manes, flowers of grandeur. Kingly blooms.
R.J.’s sun-baked face would have lit with words I overheard of a dandelion-wise girl: “These are not weeds. These are wishing flowers.”
Wishing flowers. Not weeds. But globes of prayer seeds to be caught up in the Spirit, carried where He blows.
Not weeds at all. For isn’t a weed only a weed if we don’t want it there?
I think about my life with its patches of tangle that I deem weeds. The messes I determine need eradication. Staining bunches of life I don’t want to touch, that I think best suits a garbage can.
Maybe I’m wrong.
True, I don’t want some of those tangles there: strong-willed children, chronic pain, lean finances. So I christen them weeds. But maybe God planted each here.
If God allowed it into my life, isn’t it intended for good? To mold this life to be more like His. When I scorn, begrudge, the dandelions in my life, I miss the beauty in what I may have not planned for my life. But God did.
With God, there are no weeds, only gardens. He redeems the weeds that took root in the Garden of Eden with the surrender of the Garden of Gethsemane. Though anguished to the point of pores oozing droplets of salty blood, Jesus took the cup. Gethsemane’s Garden pierced. But for our salvation.
God’s the redemptive Gardner, taking the dastardly meant for evil and using it for good. Petals intended for loveliness.
The eye beholds only beauty when I frame our lives with God. It is He who walk this life-garden, faithfully tending, pruning, planting. And He gives only good.
I see this day pooling gold differently and it calls me to come. I open the front-porch door, step down onto dew-dangled lawn. Indiscriminately, I pick. For aren’t they all dandy?
I’ll fill a jar with water, set them singing in the middle of the table. Doesn’t the wide world beckon to gather former weeds as beauty bouquets, give thanks for the cup that He gives, and drink?
I’ll take dandelion wine.
