How to Make Peace with Nature: Part II by Dawn Downey, Guest Blogger

 On the way to the mailbox, I leaned over to pull out dandelions popping up through the cracks in the driveway. I grabbed sturdy leaves in a bunch, my knuckles scraping concrete, and I yanked. Another plant seemed to pop up every time I plucked. They were cartoon dandelions, each tap root connected to the top of another dandelion in the ground beneath it, whose tap root was connected to the next, an endless chain all the way down to China. That's it. Time for reinforcements.

Give me fungicides, pesticides, herbicides, and any other cides on the market.

The idea shriveled up, dead on the vine. A sensation I'd never felt before crept across my sweaty palm, informing me I would not be using any weed killer. It stopped my bomb-'em-back-to-the-stone-age plans as effortlessly as a red light stops my car.

I quit using chemicals in the yard a couple years ago, because of the environmental impact on ground water and pollinators. Blah blah blah. This new feeling didn’t give a hoot about all those fancy words. It was unimpressed by my intellectual prowess and unconcerned with ecological issues. It simply zapped away the distance from between Dawn the Gardener and Betty the Bee.

I'll pull weeds by hand. Spraying poison would be shooting myself in the foot. Lesson two: disarm.