No doubt about it. Progress has made massacres upon us. Progress goes ahead to find happiness. That's the trouble with the thing. For the way to happiness is backwards. The way uncles and lobsters are oriented. Lobsters and uncles go ahead backwards. At least, all my uncles did. The Golden Age was a long way to the rear, and they knew it. They turned their broadsides and their rear upholstery towards the dubious future as they advanced and kept their bright eyes on the past. It's the only safe way. Aunts always go frontwards and stick their noses into other people's business. But not uncles. Not I.
Progress goes ahead and destroys the best things, the things that should not change, like love, like cookery, like boys, for instance. I never knew a boy to get better as he filled out his breeches. The more to him, the less poetry, the less boy. It makes me grow philosophical, in a Spinoza-like way, to think of boys growing up into dubious men. So I won't think.
Among the many beautiful things the iron foot of progress crushes are the seasons. It hasn't done enough damage, these last eighty years, in destroying night, for us and the chickens, by electricity. It went right ahead and abolished the seasons. Thanks to quick-freezing, you can now eat asparagus in December and venison on the Fourth of July. They aren't really good asparagus or very tender venison; they taste a lot like plastics, but there they are. Out of season. Out of reason. Our of place. Unholy. In the white months we have greens. New peas for St. Valentine's Day. And there is no more Spring. We don't need it, they say. Because Spring is all the year round, it ceases to matter. It shrivels up and disappears. You can't blame it at all.
Spring was necessary to our bodily and mental economy. It really was. It was the time of love. It was the time of greens. I speak in the past tense, and sadly. It was the time of rejuvenation, All my boyhood love affairs started in the Spring—and usually ended there, I being the kind 'of boy I was. Only once did I break that choral dance of the seasons when I fell violently in love on Washingon's Birthday. It didn't take. And she hit me on the head with a croquet mallet later on, in the Spring, when she should have been tender and admiring of me. Maybe the militancy of Washington's Birthday came out in her that way. Anyway, it was my worst love affair of all, I never fell in love again on either side of Spring. Only just smack in the middle of it.
Green. Color of fairyland. Color of resurrection. Color of life. Only those who live up under the rim of the blue bowl of the Arctic region—as I do—can appreciate what green means. The green half of the year restores us after the white half has brought us low. We turn ourselves and our cows out into a greening world, and we browse and luxuriate. It restoreth our souls. Greens are better than sulphur and molasses as a rejuvenator. Nebuchadnezzar wasn't in his dotage when he took to grass. He was catching his second breath, recovering his lost manhood, or boyhood. He was renewing himself, like the phoenix of Araby, on the green fires of the world. They should have let him graze. He wasn't going foolish. He was growing wise. And I bet I know what danderish greens he was eating to get his dander up. I am coming to them.
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.
Dandelions have this added zest. You pick them in your own back yard, in everybody's back yards. You don't have to buy them. That is another great virtue of them. You don't even have to pick them if you have a lot of spry-thighed boys around. And I always plan on having a lot of them. I served my apprenticeship as a dandelion-gatherer for hankering uncles, and under their watchful eyes, Now it is other boys' turn. So I give each boy a case knife, encouragement, a big basket, and a smack on his overalls to start him off smartly, as my uncles used to start me, and then I get out the biggest old black iron kettle and put it on. It's that kettle that sits down deep through the stovehole and rests its bottom right on the hot coals of the fire and boils contemplatively. I sit back philosophically and cheer the boys on through the back kitchen window.
I don't know of any handsomer sight than a greening field starred over with little suns of dandelions and little sons in overalls going on all fours, digging me my first mess of dandelion greens in the high tide of the year. It is a sight that makes me glow and start boiling along with the water in my waiting big kettle deep in the stove.
When the boys come in, I dump the baskets of Spring's green little octopi out into a pan and wash the grit out of them in cold water. Then I go down cellar—or head a smart boy down that direction—for the salt pork. I take a great hunk of it, about enough to fill my kettle one sixth full, Say, three pounds to a peck of greens. Dandelions are heaven, all right, and full of heaven's chlorophyll, but they need assistance. They need the assistance of something stout. And pig is your stoutest meat. He is also, salted down as he has been all winter through in a barrel, all the seasoning you need.
I crown the boiling kettle halfway up with the greens. Then I put in the pork, lacerated into cubes and rhomboids, nesting the pieces on the foundation of Spring. I stow in the rest of the dandelions right up to the kettle's top, smack the lid on, breeze up my beechwood fire, sit back, and let her steam. I let her steam for three hours. Four sometimes, if it is late in dandelion week. I steam the dandelions first with the kettle set down on the coals, then up on top of the cover, and last on the buck of the stove, where she can simmer quietly by herself to her heart's content.
I let the dandelions cook until every last vitamin is gone out of them. Vitamins are for pills and pale people. I am for rejuvenation, chlorophyll, love, and my lost youth. I cook the greens until the essence of salt pork and the essence of the sun's green power have married indissolubly. It is matrimony made in heaven and a marriage that is a miracle of sweet harmony.
I have heard tell of people who eat dandelions green, raw, in the nude. But I don't number such people among my friends. I don't trust them. I believe they would suck eggs. They'd have to, they get such small good out of their greens. Such lovers of the raw lack essential essences. And they never have the generous mustaches and broad muscles and broad minds that my uncles used to have, dipping up dandelion greens and fat pork in equal proportions and shoving them by the forkful under the awnings of their mustaches. There my uncles sat, growing, rejuvenating, dipping up the dandelions mellowed over with a dash of our cider vinegar and escorted down by my mother's best brown biscuits, the best of all accompaniments. And I sat right smack across from them, keeping abreast of them with my forkfuls of chlorophyll unlimited. It was Spring and love and eight hands around!
Gosh! When I think of Spring, it comes to me first in the bittersweet flavor of honest, common dandelions, cooked for hours with honest, plain salt pork, grown right on your own home place alongside the dandelions. A wedding of home folks!
Dandelion greens, by the bye, are a whole meal. Let the anemic people who think of dandelions as something raw or steamed for five minutes as a side dish, as an extra, as a filigree to a meal, ponder that stout fact. These greens are the cellar, the living room, the chamber, and the attic. Buttressed about with salt pork, they are the makings of a man for one whole day of his life. They are the builders of dander. They are what old Nebuchadnezzar was rooting the earth to find. He who eats dandelions cooked my way, the right way, eats the sun and the other stars, as well as iron, I guess, love, and lots of pig. Sure enough, if they are dug up at their prime, at the peak of Spring, they have, each plant of them, one or two baby suns still rolled tightly at the center of their cosmos—globes which, when you bite into them, show a live and lovely gold at the heart.
Eaten all through the year, and eaten more as a mere vegetable, and not as a whole dinner, eaten as a supplement to other dishes, dandelions cease to be the center of the cosmos. They are just another green. But eaten as a whole meal, as the whole works, dandelion greens are remakers of men. Eaten at the flood tide of May, when a quadrillion of small suns across the whole map of America turn their fresh faces up to their golden father, eaten by people starved for six months for chlorophyll, used, with their still-budding suns folded in buds, to ignite and renew man like the sunlight that sets the phoenix bird on fire, dandelion greens are an act of Providence and a green climax to the year.
Like love, dandelion greens are not for every day or every month. They are to be enjoyed in bulk, in bushels, within their proper season. Their season is the Spring of the year when small boys and young ram-lambs dance along the sky. Their time is when the voice of the turtledove is heard in the land, when the snake casts her azure skin and grows young again, when trout rise to May flies in sudden rainbows, when blossoms snow the apple orchards, when the plowman plows, and little girls dance in a ring and choose their blushing partners in slender dungarees for the day, and maybe for a lifetime of Springs, and dandelions, together.
The manifest destiny of these sons of Spring and the Spring sun is a vast iron pot, enriched and stoutened by thick, fat salt pork and three or four hours of steady boiling. Then they become what once they used to be in the boyhood of our nation's history—sweet makings of stout Americans.