The Mother of All Colours

Finding Dandelion Glee

We lived in Sydenham. The house was an old redbrick Manse owned by the church but we were allowed to use it while my dad was the minister there. They said the pipes underground might be lined with lead and maybe that’s why my Mama got sick. When the ice melted, the yard used to flood in the spring. We would go to the high place by the crabapple tree and call it an island and then send messages out in a bottle. There was a witch that lived in the old barn on the edge of the yard, and some rocks that had rust stains that proved there was gold somewhere underneath. Maybe rubies. The witch guarded those. In that yard we tried to dig to China and found some bits of plate which meant we were getting close. We kept digging until we found a strange purple and white grub wriggling in a sun it had never seen. That scared us and we stopped our digging. After the floods in the spring, the lawn was full of dandelions. In that yard we learned “crack the whip” from my Kentucky granddad who wore sky blue sear sucker suits and mesh shoes. My grandmother had the longest white hair like a waterfall but always hidden, pinned-up with something made of bone that was from Japan. They would come visit in their white Ford Pinto loaded with marshmallow and jam cookies out of a box that we would normally never have been allowed to eat. In the picture that’s me in the foreground. In the far background is my sister Leah kind of doing her own thing. Amy is wearing the halter top. Judah in the striped shirt. I have no idea who the guy in the checked shirt is. I think it was Uncle Tom who maybe came up to visit in the Pinto but I can’t remember exactly who he is or how he is related to us. Some vague relative anyway.

I remember that fence, how it made our yard a world. I remember that feeling I see in this picture. I remember this small town where I learned to make traps in the sandbox with the next door neighbour Cathy who was a tomboy. Our little town with the train tracks and the creek, and the church I used to hide my gum in the corner of in winter and then at the end of church it was almost frozen and I put it back in my mouth and it felt secret. The church where my Papa embarrassed us by bringing real palm fronds into the church and lying them down in the aisle and then getting everyone on the carpet that only the ministers are supposed to go on, and Bob Dylan on his guitar which made people uncomfortable. I remember my rocking horse, Brownie, was in that house. I used to listen to the same record over and over in that brick house. The record had a picture of cherries on it. Brownie was like a friend and I called him that because we once lived in a place with horse called Brownie that smelled like warm hay and used to lick me with his huge tongue breath a golden intensification of summer grass. The light in the living room where I listened to the record was of that same slowed golden light.

The Dandelions across from my house in the green space in front of the Police Station

Today I spent an hour in the police station across my house picking dandelions and then another hour in my kitchen separating just the most yellow of the petals and putting them in a pot and boiling them up. I put a chunk of alum that I’d been saving that I found years ago in a plastic container on a shelf at the back of a middle eastern grocery store in a strip mall in California. The alum brightened the yellow of the dandelion petals. I made a green-yellow liquid. Maybe it’s not quite an ink. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It’s of the sun, the mother of all colours. A radiant lioness of the fields.

The witches love dandelions because that have all the celestial symbols. Yellow for the sun, white when they seed for the the moon, and when the seeds float through the air they look like stars. I like dandelions for a million reasons. Because they cure cancer, because they are everywhere, because of the way their bitter bite fits into a salad. Because their roots made a kind of coffee for Susanna Moody and the early Canadian pioneers. Because of Kit Williams. Because of dandelion chains and dandelion crowns and all the magic that happened in yards when you were young. Young enough to see magic everywhere that did not need a name or a recipe. Young enough to not distinguish between flower and weed. Young enough that the yellow was like the yellow in a crayon you made a sun with. A sun that was a round ball that you pressed into the paper in a spiral with all your might.

Happy Mother’s day to all the kinds of mothers and mothering our world needs.

Love from Jason

From They Dream Only of America by John Ashbery

Guido Cagnacci,Detail from Allegoria dle Tempo (la vita umana), c 1650