In Plain View

The Magic of the “Wishing Flowers”

In Plain View

Leonard Woolsey

Apparently, I am a master gardener—just ask my neighbors.

“Dad,” says my eight-year-old daughter, “look at how many ‘wishing flowers’ we have in the front yard.”

Looking out across the front lawn, I notice only a healthy crop of dandelions gently aging in the sunlight.

“What do you mean, ‘wishing flowers?’”

“You know, the flowers you make a wish with, and they blow away in the wind.”

I could hear the lawn, full of ripening yellow flowers, calling me to come and spend the afternoon with it.

What my eyes—and my neighbors—are seeing is something much different from that of an eight-year-old waiting anxiously for the yellow flowers to suddenly evolve into a white, bushy-headed tool for her deepest wishes.

Our conversation continues to remind me that one day, I am going to honestly miss having someone challenge my perspective of the world each day.  As my son, now twelve years old, increasingly finds himself questioning the rules outside the realm of a parent’s influence, I know that all too soon his sister will follow in his footsteps. While he questions the role of government in people’s lives, she wrestles understanding how I know which plant in the flowerbed is a weed.

“How do you know what a weed looks like?” she says.

“Well,” I say, “it’s anything growing where you don’t want it to grow in a particular place in the yard.”

“But,” she says, holding a bouquet of yellow flowers in the palm of her hand, “they are so pretty. Why don’t you want them in the yard?”

My neighbors are true master gardeners—that is, their lawns are immaculate carpets of green. I look across with a serious case of lawn-envy. My eyes quickly refocus on the colorful crop on display in our front yard.

I look back down at the dozens of fuzzy heads spilling from her small hand as she continues to pluck the heads from the ground below.