Dandelion Dreams

Favorites are a struggle for me. 

Growing up in a large family, one person’s favorite food, song, tv show, seat on the couch, place at the dinner table, etc., just aren’t that big of a priority.  My mom did a great job of ensuring that each of us had our favorite meal and flavor of cake on our birthday.  As a rule, I ALWAYS requested spaghetti or lasagna, because holy YUM!  But I hated cake…frosting was another thing.  I would eat the frosting and leave the cake, which was not a popular decision with my mom.  I can still hear her voice in my head when I go for the frosting on a beautiful piece of cake, “eat the cake, don’t just lick the frosting!” Ha!

As a kid, I never struggled to tell anyone that pink was my favorite color, cats were  my favorite animal, and my favorite food was spaghetti.  Life was simple.

Somewhere along the line, as life became more complicated, all of that changed and I lost so much of myself that I even lost my favorites.

The past couple of years, I have been on a journey to find out who I am because I honestly had no idea. This journey started in a simple place…figuring out my favorites.  It has been an eye-opening experience!

It’s no surprise that a favorite flower was on my list of things I wanted to discover.  I have been the happy recipient of many, many flowers in my life, and I love them.  But honestly, I am just as delighted to receive a hand-picked bouquet of wildflowers from one of my kids while we are out camping as I am to receive a dozen red roses arranged in a fancy vase.  So, I started thinking about flowers and what they mean.

This is where my learning about myself became vital.

I have learned that things that have meaning are what I like best — as with most things in life, being pretty isn’t enough.  I appreciate them for their beauty and the symbolism that often comes with them, but to be my FAVORITE flower, it had to be something more than pretty.

As I sat in my backyard last summer playing with our new delicious little puppy, I was looking at the dandelions and thinking how I needed to spray for weeds again.  My yard is a never-ending struggle that makes me fight the urge to move into an apartment with no yard.  But there I was…sitting in the grass…among the dandelions.  I picked one of the dandelions, all in fluff, and looked at it.

Each little tiny parachute of fluff holds a seed with all the genetic material necessary to grow another entire dandelion.  As it sits there in its delicate little puffball, each of those seeds is just waits patiently for the winds of opportunity to carry them to their future where they will put down roots and blossom into a beautiful yellow flower.

I realized, that’s me.

Jason’s death was a giant gust of wind that destroyed my delicate existence, and I found myself being carried however unwillingly into an unknown future where I will be able to put down roots and flourish into the person I was always meant to be.

This realization brought on a lot of emotions I didn’t expect.

Sadness…anxiety…overwhelm…excitedness…and finally, peace.

I have not landed yet, I don’t know when I will, but I am not scared anymore, I am excited.  I have big dreams, and even bigger aspirations, and I look forward to the future.

But now when someone asks me what my favorite flower is, I actually have an answer.  A dandelion in summer, full of potential and possibility, just waiting for its story to begin.