The grass is so much greener in my childhood memories. I have many of when I lived in the house I grew up in in Hawaii. The single level home with a Coconut tree in the yard; Bushes abloom skirted its trim. I would pull red honeysuckles and suck the nectar from each stem like a hummingbird stalled in flight.

But then I opened an album with corners bent by time. And a photograph caught my eye of myself standing in that yard on the first day of school. My knees were bent beneath a hand-made hem. Shoes so new they ached at the soil beneath. I saw myself standing in that grass. My hands folded into one another under tails of braids draped upon my chest. All seemed in place to my memory. Except in my memories, the grass was green.

My childhood is filled with colors so vivid they make current thoughts seem pale. For thirty years I envisioned that yard an emerald cut worthy of a queen. Yet this photograph changed my mind.

Blades I used to pull and whistle between my teeth, were scattered in a keyboard of weeds. Perhaps it is that, as a child, I chose to only see the green.

I was fascinated by the dew. How it could drape a lawn in diamonds and make the world seem new.

I took a second look. Perhaps it was the aged coating on the paper? My mind played a game with blocks of time.

It was true. I had imagined wrong for so very long. The grass was not as green. But this doesn't mean the love I felt was filled with lesser hues. It is how I viewed the weeds that mattered. And to me, they were as perfect as my mood.

Don't ever let anyone tell you a dandelion is not a flower worthy of spotting a lawn or of decorating this world with colors that dance like the blooms that trim a yard.

I closed the album and left it there. For someone else to see. Because the only memories I will ever need, are of a grass I saw as green.