Wishing Flowers
To the scientific world its taraxacum; to a country club greenskeeper its seeds blow in the breeze and plant themselves into every nightmare they have ever had. The general public calls it a weed, but to my almost five year old little girl it’s something altogether different; when she sees a dandelion in the yard, she doesn’t see a non-native plant dead set on ruining the perfectly manicured lawns of suburbanites. She sees a world of possibilities in all those little seeds.
This morning as we pulled into the parking lot at church, over the swells of steel guitar coming through the truck speakers, because what else would you listen to on the way to Easter services other than Ray Price’s Crazy Arms, I heard a faint voice from the backseat.
“Look at all of those wishing flowers,” my nearly five year old daughter said. “They’re so pretty.”
In a patch of grass towards the back of the parking lot, there were dandelions all over the place; the little median was so white it looked as though somehow a snow storm had snuck up on us and somehow only fell on that single little strip of grass. She walked over and grabbed a single dandelion, closed her eyes tightly, and blew as hard as she could.
We made our way across the parking lot and I heard her whisper, “I hope my wish comes true.”
I asked what she wished for, and over the objections of her brothers who feared she would jinx her wish, she told me that she had wished that her booboo on her arm would go away. I resisted the urge to make it a teaching moment about superstition and God’s sovereignty and instead just soaked in the innocence of it all.
It made me glad that her biggest problem so far in life is a cut she got on her trampoline; it also reminded me that life is all about perspective. If we all could see a field of dandelions and see a wealth of yet unfulfilled wishes, maybe we would be as optimistic as my little girl.
