Dandelion Wine (Green Town, #1)

by Ray Bradbury

I learned to keep going back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

What they talked of all evening long, no one remembered next day. It wasn’t important to anyone what the adults talked about; it was only important that the sounds came and went over the delicate ferns that bordered the porch on three sides;

“Don’t,” said Leo Auffmann. “How have we used machines so far, to make people cry? Yes! Every time man and the machine look like they will get on all right—boom! Someone adds a cog, airplanes drop bombs on us, cars run us off cliffs. So is the boy wrong to ask? No! No …”

The shocks of life, he thought, biking along, what were they? Getting born, growing up, growing old, dying. Not much to do about the first. But—the other three?

“My land, it was a hot day today. Earth soaks up all the heat and lets it out at night. It’ll be soggy sleeping.”

Leo, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after awhile, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let’s have something else. People are like that, Leo. How could you forget?” “Did I?” “Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away.” “But Lena, that’s sad.” “No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness. So two things you did you should never have. You made quick things go slow and stay around. You brought things faraway to our backyard where they don’t belong, where they just tell you, ‘No, you’ll never travel, Lena Auffmann, Paris you’ll never see! Rome you’ll never visit.’ But I always knew that, so why tell me? Better to forget and make do, Leo, make do, eh?”

Jane looked at her and then glanced nervously away. “You were.” “I?” Mrs. Bentley laughed and put her withered claw to her small bosom. “About what?” “About your age. About being a little girl.” Mrs. Bentley stiffened. “But I was, many years ago, a little girl just like you.” “Come on, Alice, Tom.” “Just a moment,” said Mrs. Bentley. “Don’t you believe me?” “I don’t know,” said Jane. “No.” “But how ridiculous! It’s perfectly obvious. Everyone was young once!” “Not you,” whispered Jane, eyes down, almost to herself. Her empty ice stick had fallen in a vanilla puddle on the porch floor. “But of course I was eight, nine, ten years old, like all of you.” The two girls gave a short, quickly-sealed-up laugh. Mrs. Bentley’s eyes glittered. “Well, I can’t waste a morning arguing with ten-year-olds.

“The idea!” said Mrs. Bentley to her dainty, rose-clustered teacup. “No one ever doubted I was a girl before. What a silly, horrible thing to do. I don’t mind being old—not really—but I do resent having my childhood taken away from me.” She could see the children racing off under the cavernous trees with her youth in their frosty fingers, invisible as air.

“Listen!” Mrs. Bentley seized the girl’s wrist. “You must take these things on faith. Someday you’ll be as old as I. People will say the same. ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds!’ One day you’ll be like me!”

And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”

“No, my dear, you’re not the dates, or the ink, or the paper. You’re not these trunks of junk and dust. You’re only you, here, now—the present you.”

“No,” said the old man, deep under. “I don’t remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms.

“When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? That’s what it is—a body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years. I can’t even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She’s safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn’t changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I’ll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I’ll swim in the lake, or I’ll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I’m in this old and ruined dragon. I’m the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming.”