Today is mild and ‘growy,’ quite a spring smell…
I had every intention of writing an essay on the humble dandelion for National Dandelion Day (April 5). It was to include a tutorial on harvesting dandelion to make dandelion tincture, medicinal tidbits, folklore, etc. When my son was little we’d pick dandelion flowers and watch them magically transform into seed-head ‘clocks’ on our windowsill or we’d use yellow tempera paint and ‘stamp’ their sunny images onto thick paper.
There are already millions of content creators providing such information, though, aren’t there? The dandelion has been around since the Pliocene, after all.
It’s frustrating existing in a time when essentially anything—real or imagined—is available at one’s fingertips. A well-meaning giant sieve known as The Algorithm filters all content. Depending on what I googled this week, where I shopped in person or online or what junk food I may have impulsively purchased, my social media feed and skyscraper/banner ads are entirely uninteresting and uninspiring. Yet, Spotify won’t use an algorithms to entice me. The company is still convinced one day I’ll listen to Pop Matters. They’ve not gleaned from my 7 hour playlists I rarely abandon the greatest decades in the history of man: the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Okay, so my point is, every time I think of a topic to share here among my friends in this little corner of Substack, a quick search shows me it’s been done before. The world appears to be shrinking—or, The Algorithm is narrowing my perspective. I am being inundated with my own interests (and sometimes, topics for which I’ve randomly searched—like, Christian Slater or Dale Bozzio’s hair).
Away from the halls of Substack I’m corresponding with a cousin about what is casually referred to as our Bradley-Tweedy-Vanderslice mystery. Dating back to the 1800s, it’s filled with intrigue: poverty, wealth, adultery, crime. Somewhere in there we found our grandmother: Amanda Bradley (or, was she a Vanderslice?).
Other mysteries vexing me on a daily basis: Where are our mayapples? It’s April, and they usually pop up in the hedgerow by now…although, it has been cool.1 My goldenseal is also curiously absent this year. Maybe it finally surrendered to the annual thrashing it received from grey squirrels and sparrows?
I have been busy researching the natural world month-by-month. I’m rewriting some things and using my dozens of nature journals and 1000s of photographs (along with my iNat obs) to add layers of detail to fiction I’ve written in the past.
Mostly, it’s for me. I enjoy thinking. And, writing. In my fictional realm, it is also spring. My mind is currently swirling with images of mourning cloaks and ghost plants. And of millipedes which fluoresce under ultra-violet light.
I hope you are all enjoying the return of the sun and daily transition to warmer temperatures (unless, of course, you’re in the southern hemisphere!); I suppose things are beginning to feel autumnal. Oh! And, in case you are wondering, the title of this essay comes from the letter written by Beatrix Potter, it can be found in, Beatrix Potter’s Farming Friendship: Lake District Letters to Joseph Moscrop 1926-1943, published in 1998. Have a wonderful week—see you again in May. ♡
Solved: They are thriving — simply hidden beneath a northern whitecedar.