If our worth is to be measured by our lawns, I am in trouble. You’ve seen those perfectly manicured lawns in the nice parts of town. Then there are farmyards that look like the cover of Country Living magazine.

Our lawn is there because something needs to grow between the buildings and the fields. Some of it was seeded to lawn grasses in a distant past. Some of it’s just what grew there.

All that said, in my simple-minded way, the yard looked spectacular this spring. Everything greened up as winter withdrew. A two-inch rain lushed it up. Amid the vivid green were bright yellows.

Yep, dandelions. It looks like it’s good year for dandelions. All over I drove around, the striking yellow blooms burst forth on the green landscape. Dandelions are resilient. Every year is a good year for dandelions.

I mentioned the beautiful dandelions to a friend. He said, “I hate them. They’re ugly.” I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Here and there are lawns that are boring green, bereft of the vivid yellows. Considerable effort went into making that so. Perfect lawns come with some expense.

I know. Dandelions are weeds. Dandelions didn’t fill the tall grass prairie that was here a couple of hundred years ago. But they sure found their niche in man’s efforts to control those prairies.

Nature will fill bare soil with something, hence weeds. If you are a farmer or a gardener, you know well the conflict between what we want to grow in a certain spot and what nature puts there.

I have made half-hearted efforts to have a Country Living lawn. I sprayed 2,4-D a few times. You need to do that consistently to win the battle with dandelions. My corn and soybeans fields already receive plenty of herbicides. Those help us make a living. Spraying my lawn doesn’t make us money.

In the lawn near the house, I’ve tried mowing the dandelions before they go to seed. Since dandelions can grow literally overnight, I never seem to get ahead of them. On a certain day, I can mow and wake up to field of puff balls the next day. Dandelions are indefatigable.

It also occurred to me that by mowing, I am selecting for low growing dandelions as they evolve. That makes me think they might be smarter than I am.

Anyway, there they are, and I might as well appreciate the beautiful yellow flowers. The bees do. There are calm days the bees are working our dandelions, clover, and apple blossoms. On a still day, you can hear a buzz. Consider that a win for nature.

There are other yellows this spring. Yellow-headed blackbirds have visited our bird feeder. Their heads are a brilliant yellow on their black bodies. It’s as if a dandelion became a bird and flew away.

A bird cousin to our yellow-heads are red-winged blackbirds. We have dozens of those flying about the farm chirping loudly. I’m not sure what they’re talking about. But it adds joy to my outside rounds.

The splotch of red on the red-wings is as vibrant as the yellow on the yellow-heads. My memory of being young is that both could be seen around sloughs and not on our farm. Perhaps there’s been shift in their behavior. Regardless, it pleasants up my day.

There’s another yellow that called for attention this spring. The moon is a type of yellow. With the dry air we’ve had, the moon has also been especially brilliant. The full moon early in May greeted me in the morning hanging in the west sky. When I get up and turn on the coffee maker, I step outside in the dark to get a sense of the day. There was a yellow orb, bright as bright, over the machine shed.

It’s two for the price of one this month, as May will have two full moons. The first on May 1 was the Flower Moon. The second on May 31 will be a Blue Moon. That feels like it means something, but I don’t know what. Maybe “peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.”

If you’re a certain age, you know I lifted that from a 1969 song, the Age of Aquarius. Maybe, we’ll have “Harmony and understanding. Sympathy and trust abounding. No more falsehoods or derisions.” We could use a little harmony and understanding right about now.

Back to 2026, I read that yellow is the most luminous of all colors on the spectrum. If dandelions want to attract attention from pollinators, yellow is the way to go. For us humans enjoying the brightness, we’re just looking in on a process in nature.

There are so many things like that. Beautiful scenes that lift our human days. It might be a single flower off a trail. It might be a majestic valley filled with many colors or a night sky of stars.

These are a grace. God could have made a world that was dull and uninteresting. We wouldn’t know better I suppose. Instead, God gives us a world filled with yellow and every other color in abundance. These graces surround us each day. We just need to see them.

Grace is a gift that is undeserved. It is a sign of loving God. All of creation is a grace.

We share that, all of humankind. Given that God gives us so much, why would human beings ever fight and hate each other? But we do.

I read obituaries regularly, even people I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking about what we leave behind and see how others did life. Recently I read this:

“He always left a smile and laughter with those around him. He found one moment in nature every day to say, ‘My God, it’s good to be alive!'”

I might try that.