Issue No. 2

Dutch Crocuses & Dandelions

Hi friends,

Happy April full moon.

This month, I’ve written about my encounters with Dutch crocuses and dandelions here at Clairden (the original name of the Tudor Revival Arts & Crafts house that we occupy a corner of). If I tell you that the themes that came up for me were death and unruliness, will you keep reading? I hope so!

Thanks for having my words in your inbox.

x Jill

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004 | Crocus vernus (Dutch Crocus)

Today I was shocked to see that almost all the crocuses were gone when it had seemed that they’d only just arrived. At first, I thought the deer had got them, but I looked it up and they’re deer resistant. Next, I wondered if another tenant in the house had taken to picking flowers. That sent me into a scarcity spiral as I imagined a future of polite, yet subversive, competition for the best blooms. That, in turn, made me feel bad about myself for being greedy in the imaginary conflict—especially since I really believe in fair sharing, particularly when it comes to the gifts of nature. But then I peered at the ground more closely and noticed purple petals barely hanging onto their shoots. Crocus remains could, in fact, be spotted in several places. The petals looked like tissue paper that had been set to flame—darkening, curling and crinkling inward, and melting away. So, they’d died a natural death it seemed.

‘The crocuses have croaked,’ I thought. “Croaked” is a word my granddaddy used to use. He croaked himself over six years ago now. A decade before that, at the end of 2006, I remember finding him in his den watching James Brown’s funeral on TV. He couldn’t get over seeing the Godfather of Soul in an open casket, surrounded by so many people. He let out a short, sharp laugh every time the camera zoomed in on the gold coffin containing Mr. Brown in his ruby red shirt, studded with jewels. “Imagine being on TV like that after you’ve croaked,” my grandfather said, gesturing with the remote.

A little over three months after James Brown died, the man I loved died. Even though I didn’t tell my grandfather myself, I could tell he knew by how he talked to me when I was over at his house. He’d parked his walker by the fridge while I was drying dishes and, seemingly apropos of nothing, offered up the bon mot that death was “nothing to worry about” because it was “like Pavarotti.” What a fresh and confounding take, I thought. I asked him what he meant as I carefully dried one of my grandmother’s teacups, but it turned out I’d misheard, and he’d actually said death was “like passing out.” We liked the idea though—that death could somehow be like Pavarotti, which I suppose meant…what? Going out on a high note?

The man I loved died less than two weeks shy of eyelash-batting spring, which, now that I think of it, was fifteen years ago today (no wonder death is on my mind). There were so many flowers at the time. Inside my apartment, condolence tulips lazed in vases, trollops in poofy skirts who knew nothing of mourning. Outside, cherry blossom pompoms rah-rah-rahed up and down the streets obliviously. And the crocuses—they thrust out of the ground like tiny purple phoenixes. It was confusing to experience such a fantastic display of spring joy when someone had died. The paradox made grief ecstatic. It felt like Death’s hands were up my skirt, even though I kept trying to pull it down.

I remember when I first “knew” that that old love of mine was going to die. There was a storm and my apartment had old leaky windows. The rain bawled through the cracks. Pathetic fallacy is a figure of speech in which the natural world is treated as though it has human emotions. When pathetic fallacy matches our own truth, it’s easier to process. The rain bawled, I bawled. The rain and I were in harmony. But what about when there’s dissonance—as was the case with the riotous delight of all those flowers in a time of mourning? And here now, with these crocuses that bloomed hard, then flamed out even before the vernal equinox?

Dissonance has its own truth—often an even greater truth—it’s just harder to process because you have to make space for two opposing ideas to be true at once. Take winter and spring. Although the former is representative of death, and the latter is representative of birth and renewal, the two can’t really be separated can they? In every season, of course, there’s both living and… croaking.

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005 | Taraxacum officinale (Dandelion)

Today I typed something into a search engine and for some reason became aware of my fingers clicking on the keyboard. ‘Look what these bony meat sticks did!’ I thought, marvelling at how they were able to call up what I needed without any fuss. ‘These fingers are tiny magicians!’ In other words, I remembered that I have a body. This may sound ridiculous, but as comic book artist Erin Williams once said—though I easily could’ve said it— “I identify more as a brain than a body.”

Since I was feeling my body, I decided to walk in the garden. I opened the door, stood at the top of the stairs and said, out loud, “Let’s go feet.” Off we hobbled down the steps, one at a time. For once, I wasn’t just taking my brain for a walk in its container—I was taking my whole body for a walk—my lungs, my legs, my eyes and ears, and all the rest (though it gets weird if you start to think your blood and bowels are also coming along for a stroll).

The first thing I noticed is that the dandelions had multiplied. Their cheerful faces were everywhere. Out of curiosity, and maybe because my brain was getting a bit jealous of all the attention my body was getting, I imagined a four-foot square on the grass and then counted the dandelions in that square: thirty-one. That means that I would not be wrong to say that there are hundreds of dandelions on this nearly 0.7-acre property. This pleases me. I have never understood the North American obsession with perfect lawns. I want a lawn that verges on a meadow and makes me want to throw down a gingham blanket and trot out a picnic basket—not a lawn that is so trim and pristine that it makes me think about Tiger Woods sinking a putt.

My affection for dandelions has been long-standing. Dandelions are probably one of the first flowers children in this part of the world learn about since they’re everywhere in spring—lawns, roadsides, banks, anywhere there is moist soil. How thrilling it was to learn as a child that dandelion means “lion’s tooth” on account of the jagged-edged leaves. To think of the flowers themselves as lion’s manes—manes that magically turn into round poofs of silvery-white tufts that can be dispersed into the wind with one puff of the breath and a wish. To a child, a dandelion is a flower of imagination and possibility.

I don’t know if I was aware as a child that I was born under the astrological sign of Leo, but I did have an affinity for lions—and the colour yellow—so dandelions always felt like they were “my” flower. Like, if I was a flower, I could totally be a dandelion. Today as I filled my basket with them, I realized though that somewhere along the line I had stopped thinking of them as my flower. Upon reflection, it’s not because I’m now grown up and no longer live so fully in my imagination, it’s because dandelions are incredibly hardy, and I am not. My body—without my consent, I might add—is more of, well, a delicate flower.

I thought about this with some sadness as I continued along my walk. I also thought about the appointment I had a year or so ago with a somatic coach who supports people in building embodiment skills (people who I assume, like me, are more comfortable living in their brains than their bodies). I told her that my body is constantly uncomfortable because of pain and tension and other weird symptoms. She assigned me five minutes of homework each day in which I was to find somewhere on my body that didn’t feel tense and to “feel into” that body part—an ear lobe, or the pad of a finger—and to “pay attention to Not Tense.” Upon recalling this, I instinctively touched the tip of my nose. Not Tense.

It was while I was feeling into the tip of my nose (on the boulevard alongside the house, where the neighbours could see) that I noticed a dandelion in all its sunshiny glory growing out of the dull grey stone half-wall that runs along one side of the garden. ‘What tenacity!’ I thought. It’s something I’ve seen before, but I never fail to be impressed to see a whole plant brightly insisting on its survival with such adaptability and resilience. A plant that is considered a weed, no less, because it’s thought to be in the wrong place, in competition with cultivated plants.

I’m now thinking about unruliness. A chronically ill body like mine is an unruly body. A weed is an unruly plant. Neither are amenable to control. Both come under attack. Both find ways to thrive anyway—even in seemingly impossible situations. In other words, it’s just dawned on me that dandelion can still be my flower (or at least one of them) after all.

I’m pleased to have reclaimed this affinity to the dandelion. Any reclamation of self feels like healing to me. Now I want to say something that I know is so cheesy it’s going to make me cringe and I’ll probably still be embarrassed about it later, but I’m going to say it anyway: I am dandelion, hear me roar.