The Last Dandelion.
His mother was the only woman on the street who never tried to to kill the dandelions. Every season the neighbors would all be out in their yard on hands and knees, rumps in the air, huffing and puffing and pulling at great yellow lumps in handfuls. They’d stand and wave them about the sky, smiling at each other. After that they’d always brag about how their lawn was dandelion free, go through great lengths to explain how they’d made it so. But not mother. She said these days people were confused- used to be that folks would remove grass to make way for dandelions but now it was the other way around and she’d never quite been able to understand it. She said that dandelions where like flowers. They were friendly little weeds that just wanted to be loved. Once she told him that wilted dandelions made her sad, that they should be loved just like any other flower and anyway, she said, they were special. They knew secrets. They were silent little prophets and if you listened close they’d tell you all about the rain, might even tell you whether or not a girl loved you. Pluck one and hold it under a person’s chin, if they laugh it means they have a taste for butter.
Sometimes the wind would blow hard and they’d chase after the little seeds. “If you catch one, just one, in between your fingers, your wildest dreams’ll come true,” mother told him. He even spent a whole three days crawling on his belly through quilted patches of yellow. Mother told him that if he found the longest dandelion stalk she’d make a tea, it had special powers and it’d make him grow tall. The tea tasted terrible, but he smiled and told her it was the best dandelion tea he’d ever had. He could have sworn he grew an entire foot before summer'd even begun that year.
That was the last spring before the dandelions started dying. The season started like every other: the snow peeled itself back in layers of dripping water until the earth was finally satisfied and the first cherry blossoms began to flash cameo pink in Mrs. DIckens yard across the street. The hummingbirds came back to T.R. Enright’s down the way, began suckling nectar again from the feeding tubes he always hung about his patio. The neighbors began flashing their rumps in the air like little spring chicks saluting the sun. They’d peck madly at their lawns and there’d be mother, tiptoeing around her front yard and reading poetry to the budding dandelions.
He couldn’t say the day exactly, but it began with a whimper. It startled him from sleep and he followed the noise, found mother in the front yard, she was on her knees tickling a lone, wilted mane amongst a sad little pride of dandelion. He heard, “please be happy...come back...I know a joke...please...be happy again…” It broke his heart but he didn’t much know what to do so he went to the kitchen and made mother a bagel with cream cheese. Served it to her with orange juice from a box that said it’d been made with 25% real juice, asked mother what she thought the rest might be made of and they both looked at the label and didn’t speak a word of what he’d seen.
This scene repeated itself in exactly the same manner every morning without fail until the cold cough of old man winter came to cover everything in white. The only thing that changed was that he ran out of meaningless things to talk about. They knew where the cream cheese was farmed and what street it was made on and that Smith’s Bagels were handcrafted to perfection, a family recipe proudly passed down for 104 years. Mostly she’d just sit there crunching loudly and staring at the wall, hardly even bothering to suck the crumbs and he just staring blankly at the table and feeling quite awkward but also unsure of what to do.
No amount of tickling managed to save that little patch. Mother placed a cross made from popsicle sticks where they used to be. She said she was fine but a shock of her hair went gray and her eyes lacked luster.
Things got progressively worse each season. After the earth broke free from snow, the cherry blossoms flashed and the hummingbirds came back to T.R. Enright’s, another patch of dandelions in mother’s once-beautiful bouquet would begin to droop. She’d try something different each season. First she had a tea party with one little dying plot for 214 mornings. He knew exactly because he marked his calendar with little x’s. She even made him cut up her bagels into tiny bite-sized pieces so she could share with each one. The season after that she tried painting; painted exactly 336 different versions of the sun and sang Frere Jacques in her best French accent the entire time. After that it was stand up comedy and she would have been hilarious, had the whole thing not been heartbreaking. The lawn kept shrinking back to green, mother’s hair to gray, more popsicle sticks appeared.
Soon she became convinced that old man Woodrow was sneaking over and poisoning them. He’d strolled by once and remarked how they seemed to be taking over her yard. She’d always known he hated dandelions. She could hear it in the smug little way he said good morning.
Then one morning mother stopped crunching her bagel, “you….” she said, and like a whipped-shy dog beaten by it’s master, it was the last time she ever looked him in the eye. She began to linger over the bagels he placed in front of her every morning with terror. Would smell the orange juice before sipping, if sipping at all, and when he’d ask if everything was ok she’d only swallow loudly and look at the floor.
A few days later, mother told him to go play in the front yard and that everything was going to be ok, then she went into the bathroom with the toaster, a thing he thought peculiar but those days most things were. He sat there for some time. Just sat there on the front porch in front of a field full of popsicle-stick crosses all darkened by long shadows of retreating sun and trying to remember the last time he didn't hate dandelions. Maybe if he’d been able to catch one of the seeds between his fingers none of this would have ever happened.
He heard a crack. The lights flashed off and then back on behind him. Something might have been burning. He looked down to the yard and giggled, the last dandelion had finally died. As he wondered what the smell was, part of him couldn’t wait to run upstairs and tell mother.