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Weeds Are Beautiful
It just depends on how you look a them
When I was a kid, there was a woman named Nora who lived up the street from us. Growing up, I lived on a dense inner-city block where all the neighbors knew each other. We had annual picnics and went in and out of each other’s homes freely. Even in the winter, it was an everyday occurance to see neighbors outside talking to each other. I once overheard Nora talking to another neighbor about the dandelions in her yard. “If there was a field of overgrown dandelions on a hill in Switzerland,” she said, “we’d think they were beautiful.”
I think of Nora every time I pull a dandelion. Nora taught preschool and was about 10 years older than my mother. She had grey hair that she wore in a bun. She cut her bangs straight across her forehead and wore little wire glasses like I imagine Cinderella’s fairy godmother would wear. Like my mom, she had three children (much older than my sisters and me) and lived in a big old house on a tree-lined street next to the train tracks.
Nora was the kind of mom I wanted to have. In my memory, she was always wearing an apron and smiling or laughing. She had a beautiful porch with two rockers on it. She seemed happy, almost jolly. My mother, in contrast, was very hip. She wore silk blouses and necklaces that looped but didn’t clasp. She was smart and biting and cool. She…
