At
this time of the year dandelions are in their full flush of
flowering. This is the time to make dandelion wine if one is so
inclined. Not me, for my freezer is still full of raspberries,
gooseberries and redcurrants and anyway, dandelion wine is fiddly,
faffy and, in the end, overly sweet.
When
we were children dandelions were ‘piss the bed’. I tried making
chains from them in the school playground. Bigger kids taunted me.
Touch those and you’ll wet the bed. I was embarrassed. How did they
know? I wet the bed anyway, even when I didn’t touch dandelions.
There
were counting games. How to tell the time using dandelion clocks.
We’d blow the seeds away, one o’clock, two o’ clock and so on.
It was always mid afternoon or early evening with dandelion clocks.
These
days dandelions have other meanings. For those
of us who consider ourselves ‘green’ they are no longer a
pernicious and evil weed, but
rather
a valuable source of food for early pollinaters and caterpillars and
no
decent gardener should ever
be
without them.
But
now, at
this
time of the year, this
first
flush
of dandelions on roadside verges bring back poignant
memories.
In
the very
last
days of our mother’s life,
when I was
making
those daily journeys to her home and the weather was so fine, the
dandelions carpeted
the
central reservation of
the dual carriageway and every year since then when they
bloom in
profusion I
am nearly
undone.
