Dandelion Wine

Great-Grandma, her 90 years of life and work at an end, realizes that it is time for her to die. She makes sure the house is in order and goes upstairs, lies down, and lets her life slowly drain away. Her relatives protest, but she knows what she’s doing. To Tom, she says they’re very much alike, but when the movie matinees have all been seen, it’s time to go. To Douglas, who cries because she won’t be with them anymore, Great-Grandma says that she’ll be there in everything he does.

The whole family gathers around her. She thanks them, and then shoos them away so she can die in peace. She remembers a dream she was having, just before she was born, and searches for its pattern. She finds it once again, and, satisfied, lets it gently lift her, like a great sea rolling away down the shoreline.

To sneak around the house rule against using flashlights for reading during sleeping hours, Douglas fills a Mason jar with fireflies. He sets it on a table and uses the light to write in his journal. He muses that machines are undependable because they rust or get discontinued, like the town trolley. He realizes that he can’t depend on people because they leave or die or get murdered. Coming to the conclusion that there’s nothing he can depend on in life, he sadly takes the jar to the window and releases the fireflies, who drift away like the sparks “of a final twilight in the history of a dying world” (248). Later, when watching a movie with friends, Douglas sees yet another cowboy get shot and die, and the sudden finality of death shocks him. He bursts into tears, rushes to the bathroom, and throws up, for he finally understands that one day, he too will die. Douglas goes to the arcade and puts a penny in the Tarot Witch slot. The wax-figure witch, sitting forever behind glass, fiddles with tarot cards and ejects a card with Douglas’s fortune on it. Later, when Tom’s coin doesn’t work, the manager, Mr. Black, kicks at the witch and curses her for costing more in repairs than she’s worth. Tom says Grandpa remembers the Tarot Witch from his own childhood. Desperate, Douglas puts another coin into the slot, and, this time, the witch awakens, stares at them, moves her hands across the cards, and produces a card that tells Douglas not to worry about death but to enjoy life. At the bottom, it reads: “PREDICTION: A long life and a lively one” (254).

Tom puts a coin in and gets an empty card with no fortune at all. Douglas is upset, for he believes that the arcade should be a bastion of sameness, and an empty fortune upsets that continuity. Douglas wonders if the Witch, long abused by the arcade manager, has sent them a secret message. He lights a match and holds it under the card; they make out the words “Secours!” and “Mme. Tarot” before the card catches fire. Douglas remembers a comedy film in which a Frenchman calls for help, crying, “Secours!” and decides they must rescue the Tarot Witch.

Later, they peer into the arcade and see an inebriated Mr. Black brandishing a knife at the Tarot Witch. Black demands a last prediction about whether the arcade will ever be successful. He inserts a coin; the card he receives angers him, and he smashes a fist into the Witch’s glass window. Douglas and Tom burst in, yelling for him to stop. Black turns, raises his knife, and then collapses in a drunken stupor. Douglas and Tom retrieve the Witch and escape. They get to the ravine, but Black catches up to them and flings the Witch into a trash heap far down the ravine. The boys enlist their father’s help to retrieve the Witch and bring her home. Dad says Douglas must purchase the Witch from Mr. Black; beyond that, their father will help them build a new housing for the wax figure. Jokingly, Douglas asks if Tom wants his fortune read. At that moment, a card slips from the Tarot Witch’s sleeve. It’s blank. Douglas promises to bathe it in chemicals; it’s sure to tell them they’ll get all they wish for and live forever.

The summer is now blazing hot. From time to time, a man named Mr. Jonas rides through the neighborhood on a horse-drawn Conestoga wagon filled with hand-me-downs and other secondhand things. Kids can hear him coming because he loves to sing made-up tunes. People give him old things they regard as junk, and others pore through his collection and take what they really need for free. Long since retired from business, he urges folks to only take what they cannot live without. Now and then, Mr. Jonas helps to deliver a baby or sits on a porch late at night, smoking and chatting with some sleepless gentleman.

On an especially hot summer morning, Douglas wakes with a bad fever, and neither his family nor the doctor can help him. Outside, the cicadas scream. Douglas’s disjointed thoughts tumble and surge with memories of summer and of people and things going away. He wails in agony. Mr. Jonas rides past, and Tom stops him, confessing that his brother is dying, apparently from the heat. Crying, he asks if the wagon has anything to help. Mr. Jonas gives Tom a set of wind chimes to hang in Douglas’s window and promises to return in the evening with something better. That evening, Douglas’s parents bring the boy outside to lie on a cot in the cooler outside air. After midnight, Mr. Jonas arrives with two green bottles and talks to the sleeping boy, telling him that he knows Douglas has experienced sad things during the summer. He asks the boy to wake up in a little while and drink in the contents of the two bottles: cool, refreshing, fragrant air captured from the Arctic, a lakeside, a spring, and a seacoast. Mr. Jonas leaves, and Douglas awakens.

Tom checks on Douglas, runs to his parents, and tells them his brother is better. They hurry outside and find Douglas sleeping, his breath no longer raspy but quiet, with “a scent of cool night and cool water and cool white snow and cool green moss, and cool moonlight on silver pebbles lying at the bottom of a quiet river” (294). In the morning, the cicadas grow silent, and it begins to rain. Upstairs, Douglas wakes, looks out the window, and reaches for his journal.

Next door, Aunt Rose visits, and the house becomes noisy with her presence. Douglas drops by to visit Grandma in her busy kitchen. He gazes at the jars of spices and condiments. One jar reads “RELISH.” Another says “SAVORY.” Douglas is glad he decided to live. Rose asks what’s for dinner, and Grandpa says it’s always a mystery. When Grandma brings in the food, it’s so delicious that everyone scrambles for seconds and thirds. No one can say for sure just what each dish contains, but they don’t care. Rose, though, insists on knowing. She visits Grandma in her messy kitchen and suggests several organizational improvements; she also replaces Grandma’s glasses and gives her a cookbook. Grandma protests, but Rose insists that it will make her cooking even better.

That evening, the meal is terrible, and Grandma is devastated. Grandpa decides that enough is enough and whispers instructions to Douglas. The next day, Douglas invites Rose to go for a walk. When they return, Rose‘s luggage sits on the porch. A train ticket rests atop it. Grandpa shakes Rose’s hand and tells her goodbye.

Returning from a shopping trip, Grandma asks what happened to Rose. Grandpa explains that, sadly, Rose left but promises to return again in 12 years. That night, the meal is still bad. Grandma says, “I’ve lost my touch […].” and bursts into tears (309). The boarders go to bed hungry. Late that night, Douglas sneaks into Grandma’s kitchen. He pulls the foodstuffs from their neatly organized bins and puts them back into the old bags and drawers where Grandma used to have them. He hides Grandma’s new spectacles and burns the cookbook in the furnace. The noise brings Grandma downstairs. She stands in the kitchen for a moment, then begins to cook. At two in the morning, the entire household sits down to a meal that’s so delicious. Douglas knows he has repaid his debt to Mr. Jonas.

Summer ends suddenly when the boys, walking downtown, see back-to-school pencils and notebooks displayed in the window of the dime store. They visit Grandpa in his cellar as he bottles the last dandelion wine of the season. Tom insists that he’ll never forget the events of this year’s summer. Grandpa starts to tell him that people’s memories fade, but he relents and lets Tom have his dream. They go upstairs to the porch, take down the porch swing, and stow it in the garage.

Douglas spends the last summer night in his grandparents’ cupola. He writes in his journal about how everything reverses at the end of summer, like a film run backward. People retreat from the outdoors, close up the windows, and trade tennis shoes for street shoes. Late in the evening, as he did at summer’s beginning, Douglas again stands at the high window and waves his hand, commanding the neighborhood to brush teeth, change into pajamas, and switch off lights. The town obliges him. He lies in bed, thinking about the autumn and winter and spring to come. He’ll visit the dandelion wine collection, should he need to remember anything. In the midst of his contemplations, he falls asleep, “[a]nd, sleeping, put[s] an end to Summer, 1928” (319).