Especially this time of year. They lay in the ground quietly waiting, conniving, preparing. Then one morning — an explosion. Everywhere. Yellow dandelions popping up under the bushes, binder weed grabbing onto the fence, crabgrass sprawling across the lawn, spurge menacing the flowerbeds, thistles rising in the ditch and burdock with foot-long roots already drilling down into the garden. Where to start digging first?

The answer is nowhere until you find the digging fork. No one ever pulls up a weed without a fork. And as anyone who’s ever chased a weed knows, there’s nothing more frustrating than holding a weed’s broken root in your hand, knowing the rest of it is still buried somewhere down below you. It will be back. They always come back.

There’s also nothing more satisfying than pulling up the entire root and gloating, tada! You are gone. You. Are. Gone.

Nature — the great equalizer — makes certain we humans don’t enjoy her offerings without some reciprocal effort on our part. No flourishing garden or beautiful flowerbed or golf course-like green lawn exists without some pulling and picking from us. Looking over a properly tended, beautifully thriving landscape is more satisfying if we’ve spent some time on our knees there to make it happen.

Nature and her weeds also teach us about prioritizing. We may really want to enjoy the outdoors after being cooped up all winter, but the weeds are doing the same thing — at a startlingly rapid pace. They grow by inches daily and are already developing the seeds they plan to drop onto your ground next week. So weed first, then play. Or later, weed first, then weed.

If we define weeds as something that shows up unbidden, grows despite our wish that it wouldn’t and eventually requires us to either decide to remove it or put up with its negative presence, then life itself is actually full of weeds.

Some illnesses are like weeds, especially the kinds that never completely yield the bottom of their roots, requiring us to deal with them growing back again and again.

Politics and war are weeds that grow all over our world, near and far. We can’t pull them out, but we still feel the impact of their seeds falling down into our own private corners, leaving us to wonder how they’ll grow to affect us in coming seasons.

Certain people can be like weeds, so noxious, so overconsuming, so demanding they will suffocate everything else in our lives if we let them grow. We pull out weeds to make room for the good stuff to flourish. So sometimes we have to decide if a toxic person should stay and thrive, or be dug up and let go. Weeding can be that ruthless — and that necessary.

Weeds actually do serve one useful purpose — they’re a great anger management tool. Have a fight with the boss? Grab the digging fork. Get annoyed with the spouse? Head to the flowerbed. Argue with the teen? Attack! Spew out all your anger and frustration at the weeds — they don’t talk back. There’s something soul satisfying about mumbling, “Take that … and that … and that!” while pulling up a weed and then another and another, passionately filling up a whole bucket while knowing they were the only things you assaulted during your 30 minutes of potentially dangerous anger.

Kudos to you for your ability to redirect.

The trick to dealing with weeds — the ones in the garden and the ones in our lives — is to keep them from pushing out the good things we want to grow. Nurture the good. Remove the bad. Sometimes it really is that simple.

Happy weeding.

D. Louise Brown lives in Layton. She writes a biweekly column for the Standard-Examiner.