Til 
DANDELIONS 
ADMIT it. Mea culpa! Vainly have I tried 
amendment. It was but a gust and could 
not tarry. I cannot break friendship with that 
flower of riotous and inspiring sunshine. Loved 
it I have and love it I will. No one need argue 
with me. I am past that. They have argued 
with me and have argued me down. I have 
been ignominiously routed and have been sent 
at dizzying pace to uproot the dandelions on the 
lawn, but could not compass it. They looked 
at me and I was lost. Had I been blind, I think 
I should have been a mole and dug on, uproot- 
ing sunlight without a sigh. But I was not a 
mole and I was not blind, and the beckoning 
gladness of the wild rush of riotous loveliness 
carried me away on its swift-rushing torrent as 
I have been carried away by Rogue River in 
Oregon, where the stones along the bottom were 
slippy with moss and roundish of form and the 
foot could not hold and the water was swift 
and shivering and I could not hold my own, 
but went incontinently “downward with the 
flood.” 
I know the dandelion has its faults, being in 
that particular a very human bit of growth. But 
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