A couple of thoughts.

After a week of rain, it finally stopped long enough this morning so I could mow my lawn. The rain's been good for the grass seed I planted five days ago, but now I have mushrooms popping up from all the dampness. My big problem with the lawn is not rain or mushrooms, but crabgrass. Every spring I dutifully dig up the areas of the previous summer's crab grass invasion and plant new grass seed. It might seem like a hopeless task, because the neighbors across the street and on both sides of us have a lot of crab grass in their lawns and they have managed to make peace with it. Each year when their crab grass goes to seed, the seeds are blown into my yard by the prevailing neighborhoods winds. They manage to find any little bare spot and make themselves right at home. By the end of the summer they are hearty and stout, spreading their runners underneath my good lawn to sprout up in an ever increasing circle. In the spring, I teach them a thing or two and rip them out by their roots for the next year's planting of new grass seed. And so it goes, year after year. But God sometimes sends a friend to break the cycle. Clover is known for all sorts of things. "Roll me over in the clover" pretty much says it all, leaving little to the imagination of a teenage farm boy. Four leaf clovers are supposed to bring good luck. Summer evenings back when I was a kid, we'd lie on the sweet grass of our front lawn, looking for four leaf clovers. When we'd find one, we were sure that luck was coming our way. Like rolling seven come eleven.
Back in thos idyllic days, crabgrass was a rumor I'd yet to hear. The only lawn invaders my father had to deal were dandelions. They're not nearly as nasty as crabgrass because they don't send runners out to spawn new, ornery offspring. Besides, you can make wine from dandelions as I did when I grew up. Ever tasted crabgrass wine?
I didn't think so.

This morning mowing the lawn, I saw some old friends. There are patches of lawn that never seem to support grass. Either the spot is too much in shade all day, or the grass is killed every winter from run-off of the ice melt along the edges of the sidewalk. Those are prime areas for crabgrass to make a new summer home. This spring, many of those areas are now blanketed with a thick covering of clover. Not only is the clover beautiful, but it too can spread with much more delicate, considerate underground roots, filling in the bare spots that would otherwise be prime property for crab grass.
Clover is a modest plant. It's not tough, but it won't be shoved around by the noisier, more obnoxious plants. Clover is polite. It doesn't make a big deal out of itself. It just quietly moves in.
I know people like that. They may not say alot, and when they do they are soft spoken. They are often overlooked, with all the attention going to the blowhards of life. But they can quietly change a neighborhood as surely as clover changes a weed-ridden lawn.

And you know this is going to expand into a chapter of my next book.