Flower Power

You know, it's spring.  A time when the birds chirp, the grass grows and flowers bloom.  All kinds of flowers.  In fact, one of my least favorite towns in all the planet - Pella - has their famous festival this weekend:  Pella Tulip Time.  Wee!  Sure, tulips are pretty, but they're a flash-in-the-pan kind of flower.  The bottle rocket of the botanical world.  SCREEEEECH!  BANG!  Wow.  It's over.  That's a tulip for you.

But I think this world needs a festival in honor of the strongest, toughest flower of them all - the dandelion.  I kind of see the dandelion as "the workin' man's flower."  The Rocky Balboa of flowerdom.  You mow it, it comes back - the next day.  You pull it, three more replace it.  You fertilize.  It gets stronger.  I'd like to propose the "Dexter Dandelion Daze." A festival that recognizes the generations of oppression that the dandelion has experienced - only to emerge stronger.

We'll sell bouquets of dandelions, dandelion wine, have parades with floats covered with dandelions.  We'll import buses packed full of old ladies to buy our stuff - dandelion crafts, a new dessert we'll invent called "Dandelion Letters," and of course celebrate our ethnic heritage. After all, dandelions originated "somewhere in Eurasia."  We'll build this festival into the powerhouse of all flower festivals.  Perhaps we'll even land our own New Year's Day bowl game!

Then, when they least expect it, we'll sneak into Pella late at night with trash bags full of dandelions - thousands upon thousands of them.  We'll then blow them all over town - spreading their seeds far and wide.  The tulips will be doomed.