If spring where you are has been anything like it is here, you are more than ready for summer. When I was a boy, summer arrived punctually on Memorial Day and lasted through mid-September. Today, it is anybody’s guess when (or if) the skies will clear, the grass dry out and the first dandelions appear.
Fortunately, you do not have to wait on the vagaries of the weather to enjoy the pleasures summer as you remember them. Dandelion Wine is a bittersweet evocation of a summer of childhood discovery and loss by master creator-of-worlds Ray Bradbury.
Dandelion Wine is set in the summer of 1928 and the main characters, brothers Douglas and Tom Spaulding, would be about my father’s age. But summer in Green Town, Ill., 90 years ago is just like the summers I remember growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, and I bet that my children and their children would recognize it, too. Bradbury has captured the essence of childhood summers and preserved it like . . . well, like a bottle of dandelion wine.
Grandpa Spaulding makes the wine from dandelions growing in the yard and family members take a little of it—just a thimbleful—as a tonic as needed. This book works in much the same way. It’s a summer tonic.
Past and present
Dandelion Wine, like many of Bradbury’s books, is episodic, built from individual short stories tied together with connecting episodes to create a narrative. Some episodes are prosaic; the excitement of a new pair of sneakers and the joy of mowing the grass (or at least the joy of listening to someone else mowing it). Some are humorous, some are suspenseful, and some border on the supernatural.
It is easy to mistake the book for mere nostalgia. But its lesson, if there is a lesson, is that you cannot live in the past. The past is important because it gives us the present. But the present is created through change; holding onto the past and refusing to accept change is a recipe for unhappiness.
The theme throughout the book is discovery and loss. Douglas Spaulding arrives at his twelfth summer with the discovery that he is alive. This is a joyous experience, but with it comes the knowledge of change, and change is loss. From old tennis shoes to old friends, nothing stays put. Of course, change also means creation and growth. This is a lot for a 12-year-old to absorb over the course of a summer.
Now and then
This could be grim, but childhood is resilient. The continuing resonance of Bradbury’s book since its publication in 1953 shows that amid all of the upheaval there is an essence that carries us from one year to the next, one generation to the next. We never completely lose the past and the present that is constantly being created from it can be a good one if we accept it and enjoy it.
This is why Dandelion Wine remains a book worth reading 65 years after it was published and 90 years after it is set. You can enjoy its nostalgia, but it can also help you appreciate the world you wake up in when you put the book down. After all, in the not-too-distant future someone is going to be nostalgic about today. These are the good old days.
Dandelion Wine is a classic and you probably can find multiple editions of it at your library or bookstore. Open it up when the sky is gray or you miss an old friend and you need a little summer tonic.