Bailey - The Dandelion - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Does any reader know of a story or poem about an old man with a bag of gold that spills and the gold becomes dandelions?

Every year my mom would joyfully shout "The old man spilled his bag of gold!" when she saw dandelions.  I wish I had asked her about it, as it haunts me every year when dandelions start to pop up.  I've hunted everywhere for its source without success.

Today I have a very short story by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey.  Her re-tellings have often appeared here.  This comes from "The Presbyterian" and appeared in Bailey's For The Children's Hour.  It's easily shared whenever you see dandelions.  Because I've told this much, you know where the story's heading, but that doesn't keep it from being worth telling.  Your listeners may or may not realize it's about the plant until the end.

 

Now like those "arrows", I urge you to spread the story (and spread the answer to my opening question, if you can.)

 I know you are probably working on any lawn you may have right now, mowing and getting it ready for warm weather.  It always reminds me of "the time when a little hard work pays off in a lot of hard work later!"  At the same time perhaps this enjoyment of dandelions will keep you from using pesticides like neonicotinoids.  As the Wikipedia article points out:

Neonicotinoid use has been linked to adverse ecological effects, including honey-bee colony collapse disorder (CCD), bumblebee decline,^[7] and declining populations of insect-eating birds. Neonicotinoids widely contaminate wetlands, streams, and rivers, and due to their widespread use, pollinating insects are chronically exposed to them. Sublethal effects from chronic low-level exposure to neonicotinoids in the environment are thought to be more common in bees than directly lethal effects. These effects upon bees include difficulty navigating, learning, and foraging, suppressed immune response, lower sperm viability, shortened lifespans of queens, and reduced numbers of new queens produced.^[6] Furthermore, organisms unaffected by, resistant to, or exposed to sublethal doses of neonicotinoid pesticides retain the pesticides in their bodies when they feed upon neonicotinoid-treated plants, which can then kill predatory insects that consume the contaminated prey.^[9]

In 2013, the European Union and some neighbouring countries restricted the use of certain neonicotinoids.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15]} In 2018 the EU banned the three main neonicotinoids (clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam) for all outdoor uses,^[16][17] but in 2020, France re-allowed the use of neonicotinoids on sugar beet crops.^[18] Several US states have restricted neonicotinoids out of concern for pollinators and bees.^[19]

The article goes on to talk about its further being studied for its adverse effect on birds, other wildlife, and mammals (i.e. US!), with additional references to articles involving amphibians and insects.  I find it interesting that Wikipedia avoided Roundup pesticide and the lawsuit settlement involving Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. 

On a far healthier effort, Dandelion Tea is one of many useful things possible from dandelions.  I also found this project to make Dandelion Soap! at Red Ted Art (there are lots of "white spaces", so keep going to get it all.)  

I would suggest you just be sure those dandelions haven't been sprayed in the past four years.  Beyond that our pollinators, bees and butterflies are crucial to our agriculture, so I strongly support efforts to ban neonics and urge you to do so, too. 

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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:        

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but the late Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for December 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 

 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. 

Have fun discovering even more stories

 

Flanders Fields, Poppies, and Pollinators for Memorial Day

For the U.S. this weekend we have Memorial Day to recognize all our armed forces who died serving our country.

For Canadian neighbors and the rest of the British Commonwealth it's Remembrance Day, but they wait until November 11, the day of the Armistice ending World War I on the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour.  (That timing also creates the saying, when something is done at the last minute, that it was done "at the eleventh hour.")

There is some confusion here in the U.S. as November 11 is our Veterans Day, honoring all who have served in our military.  Memorial Day was strictly intended to remember those who gave their lives in the military, not our current military, nor its veterans.

For both the U.S., the British Commonwealth, and even many non-Commonwealth nations, poppies are a visual symbol pointing back to a poem, "In Flanders Fields", by Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, in the spring of 1915, shortly after attending the funeral of a friend in Ypres and seeing poppies growing in battle-scarred fields where the soldiers had been buried.

When I do my World War I program I use a black and white photo (although it started with the hint of

the red that so impressed Dr. McCrae) because that's the photo a veteran, like Oleda Joure Christides, would have.  She also knew about the poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead.

Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

After the First World War, the poppy was adopted as a symbol of Remembrance and their bright red color reminds people of all the blood shed.  I was told at the time of the poem it was one of the only things able to bloom in the cemetery there.  The flower is a perfect example of why wildflowers should never be called weeds.  Wikipedia, in an article about it under its scientific name of Papaver rhoeas says, "Due to the extent of ground disturbance in warfare during World War I, corn poppies bloomed in between the trench lines and no man's lands on the Western front."  I was even told lime was used for those graves, so that further eliminated most things from growing there.  In that same article about the flower, Wikipedia states, "Before the advent of herbicides, P. rhoeas sometimes was abundant in agricultural fields."

The picture at the opening of today's article shows the cemetery has changed from the days of preliminary crosses and wildflowers finding their way onto the grounds where so much blood was shed.  The flowers and tombstones look too cultivated to be what was seen in the early Twentieth Century.  I am encouraged that the European Union has banned the use of neonicotinoid pesticides because they have proven it has killed bees, butterflies and, more recently, declining bird populations also are being linked to the pesticides.  Pollinators like these are crucial to our own survival because they are needed for our agriculture and food production.  Here's a link to a petition to our own Environmental Protection Agency asking that they, too, ban this war on our own pollinators. The  underlining of the word "Protection" is my own, since that is supposed to be what the agency does.

Both Memorial Day and flowers remind me of that song about "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and how it ends with the repeated phrase "When will they ever learn?"  Personally I wish Memorial Day, wonderful as it always is to have a three day holiday, had stayed on May 30 because moving it to the last Monday in May has changed it to what people now call "the unofficial start of summer."  It was meant to be more than that.

Speaking of summer starting unoffically, here in Michigan's version of the Great Lakes' version of Lake Woebegone we barely gave a nod to springtime before summer arrived with 90 degrees!

As for World War I itself, I keep remembering the commonly used statement "Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it."  My program with me portraying Oleda tries to honor her, our veterans, and Women's History.  I sincerely hope it continues after November 11, 2018 as its message is not just about that "eleventh hour" or even Flanders Field.