Uncorking Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine

My brother made dandelion wine for several years because of Ray Bradbury, making sure to pick only the first blooms. The end result was light, crisp, and knocked your head off. We stored it in our fruit cellar, early summer in a bottle.

I wrote poems and sketches because of Ray Bradbury. Spent hours listening to Bolero on the living room rug while reading “The Martian Chronicles,” leaning on my upstairs bedroom window ledge reading “Dandelion Wine.” I longed for space travel and the stars of his stories, spent nights peering through a telescope as I dreamed about colonizing Mars or soaring farther in his rockets. Inhaled his writing and tried to exhale my own version of his memorable phrases.

Our writing styles are worlds apart, literally, but the content? I love to dabble in “what if” and capture a moment where I grew up, hold my family in time. Love small towns, star songs. Would I want to have wings like Uncle Einar? Would I spare the last Martian and not expect him to replace a long-missed family member? Would I hide Grandma’s glasses and return her cooking skills to pay a debt forward? Clever, that.

I still try to realize that I am alive, and celebrate that awareness, even if I use my pen and not a Ticonderoga pencil. I followed Mr. Bradbury for years, through rocket travel and electronic grandmas to carnivals and darker, shadowy shivers. My great-grandmother was a time machine. My mother warned us of the Lonely One. Front porches still call my name, and my childhood neighborhood recognized summer, oak-falling Halloween, and encouraged children to chase fireflies.

Mr. Bradbury, you couldn’t have known that my desire to finish stories came from your insistence that I, too, could leap from my bed, jot down words or a phrase, and follow them into a portable adventure on paper.

We traveled the stars together. We played with poems and delicious phrases together. We sipped dandelion wine together and dreamed from attic-type windows.

I believe that a smile can kill a witch, that laughter is powerful, and that the word “love” across spacetime can unite souls.

I believe that you will continue to inspire and encourage me as long as I live and write, and look forward to sharing more of your stories in the New Kingdom.