For longer than we've been married, my husband and I have been trying to finish Ray Bradbury's summertime classic, Dandelion Wine. We started reading the slender volume of summertime, Americana-drenched vignettes aloud together one summer, long ago, but never finished it. Several summers later we tried to read the book again, but didn't get past chapter three. Our third attempt was no more successful.
In the time it has taken us to *not* read Dandelion Wine, we have finished many sprawling series, such as The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, Harry Potter. We read the Iliad out loud, sitting side-by-side at the dining room table in Turin. We read fiction and non-fiction, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream. We read newspapers, magazines, novels, instruction manuals, and poetry. We read books aloud together in English, Italian, and French. We read at least four other books by Ray Bradbury.
So why did we repeatedly fail to finish Dandelion Wine?
Dandelion Wine is the distilled essence of summer: sunshine and sneakers, hot kitchens, porches, lemonade, and ice cream parlors. It isn't best read cramped in a suffocating, miserable apartment, in a land where everyone flees from their hometown during the month of August, or in a bustling city. It's easier to see The Swan in a quiet, small town where people sit on their porches late into the evening. It's easier to sense the Lonely One behind you when the cicadas and crickets have worked their hypnotic song deep into your dreams.
But, no matter where you're living when Dandelion Wine slides between your hands, the magic won't leap off the pages until you can quietly follow the residents of Green Town through the summer of 1928 as June ripens to July, bakes into August, fades to September. It's time to read Dandelion Wine when the reader is ready to accept, along with the residents of Green Town, that what makes life so beautiful is the fact that it's all only temporary.
Throughout the book we say hello, only to say good-bye. As Mrs. Bentley cherishes childhood memories she comes to the realization that she was never a child. Miss Fern and Miss Roberts are thrilled by the the Green Machine, but soon vow never to drive it again. The trolley goes on its last ride. John Huff leaves Green Town for good. We say good-bye to Grandma.
Half of summer's glory is knowing that it fades, turns into back-to-school notebooks and ten-cent erasers. If the seasons never changed, if children never grew into withered old men and women, if even the people we loved never died, would any of our experience be so precious? Finding the summer where it was okay to love things and lose them all at the same time wasn't easy- at least, it wasn't easy for me.
This summer my husband and I began Dandelion Wine in June, and finished the last chapter during the last dusty days before September. We wanted to read the paperback copy we started all those summers ago, a copy which followed us from apartment to apartment and across the ocean (twice) to return to us when we were finally ready to read it. The book is also available in Kindle format, and ranks #38,084 in the Kindle Store.
