Scientists—if you want to listen to them after what they have done to us—say it's the chlorophyll. That is what we used to hanker so for—before science came along and gave us greens for internal as well as external use at Christmas, and so broke up the right sequence of things, the saraband of the seasons, that slow dance of life.
Plants get chlorophyll somehow from the sun. They have it. We don't. So we hanker. Something about the way our cells are put together is against our getting our chlorophyll—which is the green of the leaf—direct from our hot old great-grandfather, the sun. So we have to get it from another branch of the family, the plants, the vegetables. Hence we crave greens. Our lives depend on them. And Spring used to bring them along. We rolled in them as cats roll in catnip, ate them, and renewed our vigor. All that was before the days of the home-freezer. Now we don't roll in them at all. We just pick at them here and there.
Now of all the greens, the ones outside the garden in the state of nature—the wild ones—are the best. You tame a plant and you do something to his flavor, to his gimp, to his pride. Loss of independence, though it may increase his size, hurts him as it hurts us humans. We grow fat and saucy under dictatorships, but we lose our souls. So does the artichoke. So does a turnip. So does a tamed green.
Of the wild greens in this our North, the commonest wild one is the finest. The dandelion. That little democratic scamp people call a weed, that yellows the whole of North America right across from the Atlantic to the Pacific every Spring of the year. It is common as dirt, common as small overalled boys who make their first barefooted appearance beside it with the same kind of tousled hair, common as kindness, common as love. And the dandelion breeds love. I know. For I usually fell in love dandelion week in May. With us up here under the edge of that azure Arctic bowl, May is about half gone when this green with golden hair suddenly transfigures the world. Dandelion week is the peak of Spring. A week more and the dandelion is a gray-haired thing, dry, incapable of inspiring love. And most of my love affairs were in the gray-haired stage, too, in my boyhood, after a week or so. Dandelions are our final proof of Spring. I once followed the Spring north from Florida to Maine in the light of yellow dandelions and the blue limbs of overalled boys, all mixed together. It took me a month and a half, but I finally made it. I ate myself north and young again on bushel upon bushel of dandelion greens.
The dandelion has gimp, snap, rankle, and vim—which are what chlorophyll is made of, I imagine. This most democratic—and I use the term sociologically and not politically, being a rock-ribbed Republicanÿlittle member of the great Greens Family put such snap and rankle into my older uncles that they got down in pants half the size of the twin hemispheres of the world and played marbles with me dandelion week, cheated and nudged, and nigged worse than a nine-year-old boy. They became nine-year-old boys. Or even eight. Talk about rejuvenation! They even tried to ride my bike—which was a poor patchwork of a thing made up of parts of my older brothers' defunct bicycles—with seats that overshadowed and overpowered its mechanisms, and they broke the hot Haverhill out of it.
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