How to know if you're a jerk: Sisyphus, the passivist, and dandelion soup

Usually it's easy to tell if someone is a jerk.

I would say that generally, I am a well-meaning, honest person, who intends no real harm on anyone. Sure, I get angry at people sometimes; litterers piss me off, tailgaiting makes me insane, and I have very little patience for telemarketers, proud idiots, or anyone who is willing to put common decency aside to get in line ahead of me at the Target checkout. But for the most part I’m a nice guy. Imagine my distress when evidence comes to light that suggests I may actually be a jerk.

Please provide an example you say? Ok.

My neighbors are ridiculously nice retired people. They are avid readers, gardeners, church-goers, hard workers, and have raised a clutch of well-adjusted grown children, who in turn spawned a bevy of grandkids, each more sweet and wonderful than the next. There is NOBODY who doesn’t like this family. Especially the patriarch, who I will call Joe, because it is the only name I could think of that would suit him as well as his own. Joe is kind and patient, generous but firm, wise, handy, and actually shares many of my own interests. He built his home and impressive family with a lifetime of hard labor in a coal mine. He is a good man, a veteran, one of the old guard, the kind of guy who has had a standing appointment with the same barber for the last 35 years, the kind of guy who changes his oil exactly at 3000 miles and NEVER forgets. And he could also definitely still kick your ass.

Joe takes care of his lawn with near-religious fervor. It is never too tall, too dry, too weedy or all weird and spotty. It is a point of pride, and he wears it like a medal from the war. But even Joe is no match for nature. Every spring, after the first few lawn cuttings, the dandelions appear. This is a fact of nature, and no amount of human interference will stop it. They are coming. But Joe fights them. He fights and fights, and always loses, and I always laugh. Today, as I write this, Joe is out in the lawn with a tool, (possibly homemade) kind of like a little flat spade on a long handle, stabbing at the dandelions, one by one. He slowly kills them all. I watch from my kitchen window, giggling quietly because I know that in 2 days or less Joe will be there again, doing exactly the same thing. He looks over toward my lawn, which is easily 40% fat, happy dandelions and shakes his head. Joe labors long, conducting his ritual killing for a solid 3 months, and for the life of me I can’t understand why. Maybe this is how people who don’t drink cope with their own smallness in the universe. I don’t know. But I think it’s funny. So why, with all his admirable qualities, do I enjoy watching this man suffer this indignitiy? Because, I am a jerk. And if you think any of this is funny, so are you.

"But why, jerk?" you may ask, "are the dandelions such an invincible enemy that a gifted writer like you could use them as an allegory for the endless, pointless, Sisyphean struggle for life on our planet?"

Mostly because Joe will never defeat the dandelions. Why? Because nature HATES his lawn. You see, nature abhors an empty space. And lawns, though humans find them soothing and attractive, are basically a wasteland, ecologically speaking. To make a lawn, the ground is usually marked off into rigid, squarish shapes, stripped of it’s thatchy, loamy surface layer, impregnated with a single species of grass, squirted with chemicals to kill anything that already lives there, then fertilized, weeded, fed, watered and mechanically brutalized to keep it looking just right. Without human intercedence a lawn is not really sustainable, it would just die. Then nature would quickly reclaim it, via little green storm troopers, like the dandelion.

Dandelions are pioneer plants. Mother nature sends them bursting forth into any ecosystem where there is room for biological improvement. They are sentries, pilots, an elite occupying force. They take root in immature or badly damaged ecosystems (like Joe’s lawn, and yours, btw) and never let go. They germinate almost instantly, grow quickly, flower and produce a bazillion seeds in a matter of days, and drill a foot long taproot as thick as your thumb (that you will never be able to remove all of) through even the hardest ground, seemingly overnight. They are bad emmer-effers, at least among flowering annual varieties.

So what’s to be done? Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. I actually think the dandelions are kinda pretty, and interestingly enough, most of the plant is edible! Dandelion leaves, when young and tender (before flowering) make a delicious salad green. Hell, you can even get them in bag salad at the grocery store. The root can be roasted and ground to make a weird, chicory-like drink, which is weird, and I doubt anybody really does this anymore, and the flowers are edible too, though they can be put to much better use in one of my favorite hobbies, making booze at home!

While you may have never heard of dandelion wine outside of a bluegrass song, it is a real thing. My grandpa, a homemade wine legend (in Sebring, Ohio) made it, as well as wines from blackberries, watermelons, and pumpkins — pretty much anything that would ferment, and was easy to grow in great abundance. Sadly I do not have grandpa’s recipe for homemade dandelion wine. It's probably for the best, as I'm not sure about the health (and legal) implications of doling out booze-making advice on the internet.

Instead, I found another old-timey favorite to share with you. While researching dandelion-based fare, one writer quipped: "Only the very poorest and the very richest people eat dandelions." Which I like. I was able to talk to a few neighbors about eating dandelions in the old days, and the only thing I heard repeatedly, aside from the Grandpa/Uncle/Cousin/Best Friend/Preacher who made wine, was dandelion soup.

Indeed most of the recipes I found online were of the fancy-pants french cuisine variety, so I had take a few of the best and drag them through the holler a little bit, hoping to conjure something your granny might cook up when the seasons finally began to turn, at the forefront of the great bursting-forth.

So all jerkiness aside, enjoy this recipe, I did.

Spouse review, quote — Dandelions? from the yard? —endquote.

Papa’s Dandelion Green Soup

You’ll need:

2 tbsp butter

4 cups dandelion greens (pick the nice light green leaves near the crown of the plant, and pick from plants that haven’t flowered yet, otherwise the leaves will be too bitter and rubbery)

2 carrots, peeled and chopped

8 or 10 ramps, wash, cut off greens and roots, dice. (If you don’t have ramps where you live, use a few cloves of garlic and a little extra onion.) More on ramps later this spring!

1 Medium onion, chopped

1 head of fresh cauliflower, chopped (or 2-3 cups frozen)

6 cups veggie stock

2 cups milk

2tbsp Dijon mustard

1 tbsp chopped parsely

Salt and pepper to taste

What you do:

Sautee the onions and ramps in butter in your big soup pot over medium high heat until they begin to soften. Add carrots, cauliflower and greens and cook for another 5 minutes.

Add stock, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes or so, until all the veggies are nice and soft.

Use stick blender, or transfer big chunks to the blender with a slotted spoon and blend until its all nice and smooth, return to soup.

Mix in milk and cook for 5-10 minutes until it begins thickening up.

Add chopped parsely leaves

Add salt, pepper , then Dijon, a little at a time, until it’s just tangy enough for your taste. The tang shouldn’t overpower the dandelion greeny flavor.

Serve with crusty bread, or grilled cheese sandwiches.