Left unchecked, dandelions can proliferate and kill the grass with their broad, flat leaves anchored to thick stems.  But Dad has the best tool for purging the lawn of dandelions, and I pluck the weeds mostly for the pleasure of utilizing the tool: a forked steel poker on the end of a long wooden stick.  A thrust into the turf cuts the weed at the root, and a flick tosses the severed plants away to die and dry.  I don’t even have to bend over.  I almost feel sad when I cannot find anymore dandelions, and have to stow the forked tool in the garage.  As I wander the yards, I sometimes slide into the sadness of mistakes made and opportunities lost: taking a week to patch a child’s bike tire; grumbling at the boys wanting new wooden swords because last week’s have already broken; not knowing my child was hurting inside, or knowing but not knowing what to do or say; being stretched and stressed and overwhelmed and unpresent when she wrecked my car and wanted reassurance but I was empty and numb and could not come out of my darkness, and she silently walked away.  And I anxiously foresee losses yet to come, portended by deteriorating strength and health and means and memory.  And I slip into seeing life as a series of sadnesses strung together.  Of course, I could choose to see my life as a collection of connected joys—but while I live for these joyful moments, I tend to gravitate toward grief, to swirl in the emotional eddies of mourning.  Megan, however, is teaching me that grief is not an illness to be cured, not a problem to be solved, not a process to be rushed through, not an incident to put behind me, but a natural human pain, a pain that is an inseparable part of love and loss, a human pain to be tended with tenderness and carried with compassion.  Thank you for teaching me.  So, now, I want to sit with my grieving neighbor dying of cancer, and to sit with her grieving spouse; I want to sit with my children in their sicknesses and joblessnesses and injustices and lonelinesses; and I will sit with my mother and my father as they approach the end of this phase of their life-existence.  I will sit with myself in my own pain, tending to it gently and patiently.  And as I wandered the yard, Sarah hugged me and praised me for the beauty of the dandelion-free turf and bragged to Dad about how hard I had worked in the yard and how beautiful the landscaping looked, and insisted he come and see, right now.  And he motored around the yard in his wheelchair, looking at everything, studying the yellow and orange marigolds, the red geraniums, the reviving arborvitae with new poking green, the weedless beds, and thanked me with, “Everything looks really nice, Rog: just perfect.”

(Pictured above: Mom’s and Dad’s back yard with the backdrop of the Wasatch mountains.  Notice the wheelchair tracks in the lawn.)