Of Dandelions and Squirrels: Lessons in the Unyielding Grit of a Generation

Before the last remnants of snowbanks melted, I started to see dandelions popping out in the neighborhood. Walking the dog on one of the rare sunny days, I wondered aloud, “How resilient are those yellow-flowered things?”

We’ve just wrapped up a long, relatively brutal winter--at least to my mind and the aging body that houses it. Maybe we are the resilient ones of our species, the dandelions of the human race.

Like my brown eyes, dandelions seem to have been with me forever. One of the joys of my young life, when school ended, was my solo visits to Crosslake and the time I spent with Clair and Mabel, my mom’s parents.  They lived in a small house that Grandpa built after they sold their resort on Rush Lake, which they named Everglades, without irony. The DIY house was situated behind the schoolhouse, just off the parking area for the Catholic Church, an imposing brick structure that I was never allowed to enter. The driveway encircled a small yard filled with oak trees, a picnic table, and a lawn that featured dandelions every summer. They were welcome visitors there, unlike the suburban neighborhood where I lived.

One day, after doing a walk in the woods with Grandpa and rowing around on Fawn Lake, I was back to the grand's house, hungry and excited for dinner. Mabel was a renowned and resourceful cook who always fed me well. But something was different this time.

The first thing on the table was a bowl of steaming greens (I didn’t know they were called greens back then). She started putting some on my plate, and, not being enamored with anything resembling vegetables, I demanded to know what it was. “Dandelion greens,” she said. “They taste like spinach.” Despite my admiration for Popeye, spinach had always caused a gag reflex in me, and that was not the flex that would get me to eat it. 

Next, she brought the entrée, deep-fried in the cast-iron frying pan she used almost daily until she was nearly 90. Although an explanation was not needed, she said, “This is squirrel, it tastes like chicken.” I’ve loved fried chicken since my first tooth came in, but again, she didn’t seem to know that wasn’t the comparison I needed to hear.

Now, 65-plus years later, I’m certain I did not eat the greens. If I ate the squirrel at all, it was the last time I ate a bushy-tailed rodent, fried or not.

Like the resilient squirrels flitting through the oak trees and the dandelions taking over the lawn, my grandparents were resilient, too. I didn’t realize it at the time, but theirs was the first generation to receive Medicare and Social Security when they retired. They lived through the Great Depression, raised four kids, and went through a couple of business failures. As we might say today, they really didn’t have a pot to piss in. Yet Grandma Mabel could whip up a meal fit for kings from whatever she had in the house.

When I started dating the Bohunk, barely old enough to drive, I was introduced to her grandparents. They were named Ed and Mary, but told me to call them grandpa and grandma, just like Becky did. Talk about making a gangly, four-eyed teenager feel like part of the family. But I digress.

Grandpa Ed was a winemaker, concocting interesting vinos in his south Minneapolis basement. One of his famous ones was the resilient dandelion, turning the noxious weeds the greatest generation tried to eradicate from their pristine suburban lawns into a delightful beverage that did not taste like spinach. And he let me enjoy a glass or two even though I was underage.

His family's favorite libation was his Rose wine. Not the well-known Rosé, but Rose, using the petals of the colorful, overflowing rose bush flowers from the plants that lined the back yard of his home. I don’t recall what made it so good. A wine connoisseur I’ve never been. Perhaps it was the resilient love in every bottle.

Resilient dandelions and squirrels around our trailer park neighborhood remind me of the resilience of people like Clair, Mabel, Ed, and Mary, who, along with so many others, inspire me to keep going.  

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something pushing right back."

— Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa (1952)