Dandelion wine...

Did you ever blow a breath of midnight with a dandelion clock? Counting aloud the number of breaths to send the starred dandelion seeds out and away into the warm breeze of a summer’s afternoon – one o’clock, two o’clock – single tiny parachutes drifting away on a fuzzy cloud of dandelion snow - three o’clock, four o’clock - seeding and setting in the vegetable patch.

“Don’t do that! My garden’ll be full of weeds.” He bellows from the bottom grass. Won’t stop me though, won’t stop me - five o’clock – have to blow a midnight - six o’clock - get safe – seven o’clock - safe from the lonely one – eight o’clock - safe to childhood - nine o’clock - my childhood – ten o’clock – 1957 to 1969 – eleven - newby when begun, twelve years older when done – Midnight.

Watch out boys, lightening attack!

If only I could write like Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, favourite of favourite books. No, that’s not him above, that’s me reflecting - or attempting to.

Dandelion Wine, written that same year that I was born; small tales shouted and whispered twenty eight years before my birth; a dream of fictional Green Town - Green Town, Illinois. What it must have been to have imagined, lived, wordsmithed that single perfect childhood summer, so lovingly bottled and stored for drinking when winter is upon us, that dream bound American town. How magical to run wild in the gully with Douglas and his friends, to watch as grandfather makes the dandelion wine, carefully packing up the joys of childhood into a magic bottle – I’m part of that story; I journey in it wearing new sneakers and lightening, rites and ceremonies, happiness machines, time machines, green machines, bad death, good death, a game of statues, dark magic, deep lakes, trolley buses, cold, cold ice cream, old ladies and young girls, beer, broken carnival tarot witch, sugar and fat, love and fever, murder, terror, all nostalgia - a book both wonderful and full of wonders.

Out with my camera last weekend and snapping dead dandelions much to Gaynor’s bewildered astonishment – ‘Why would anyone want to take a picture of a dandelion?’ Why indeed? Don’t know – but I can’t look at a dandelion without falling headlong deep into Green Town. I see the sun yellow of a flower head, the moonbeam silver of a clock, and I’m in and up to my eyes in an instant - dipping in and out, living a story here, dreaming a tale there.

Often I’ll pick up my old copy and read a single short story of a chapter - then each spring and almost every autumn I read again cover to cover - twenty years or more. I must have read that copy thirty times, with each and every time a different pleasure. Some books are like that, some books seem written for us alone, personal mirrors for each of us to look into, watching, seeing ourselves, our lives, our dreams - reflections and reflection.

Reflections and reflection. Do you have one? If not, read mine, read Dandelion Wine.

Here’s a small sweet taste from the stirring spoon:

"Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers." Ray Bradbury.