Why You Need to Read “Dandelion Wine” Before Summer Ends
A Guide to Enchanted Living
There is a book that I think about every summer. In my mind this book is summer, with its glorious upswell of heat, syrupy golden sunlight, and lazy afternoons that turn into velvety evenings lit by the twinkle of fireflies.
This book is pure Americana and it makes me think of the sizzling scent of spent firecrackers twined with the smell of fresh cut grass, the taste of apple pie fresh from the oven, and the fizzy-giddy knowledge that you have months of no school stretching out before you to fill with adventure.
The book is Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury and today I’m going to beg you to read it.
Think of it, think of it!
Dandelion Wine, published in 1957, recounts the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois through the eyes of twelve-year-old Douglas Spalding. The novel unfolds in a series of interconnected vignettes that form a seamless tapestry brimming with ordinary moments made sublime. There are no epic quests here; instead we are given the little moments of childhood, like the thrill of getting new sneakers, the shivering fear of hearing a scary story, and the solemnity of realizing, for the first time, that you are really and truly alive.
Of all the beautiful passages in this book, this is the scene that stays with me the most, that makes me shake my head in awe every time I remember it. The scene comes along early in the novel when Doug goes with his father and little brother Tom to look for grapes in the woods. Summer has just begun and the woods around them are pierced with sunlight and full of rustling shadows. Carrying their tin pails the boys are told by their father to look for bees because “bees hang around grapes like boys around kitchens.”
As they walk along through the dense press of the woods, Doug feels like something is following them. He doesn’t feel fear, exactly, but a thrilling, creeping sense of wonder.
Doug’s father keeps talking about this and that, saying he likes to listen to the silence because in the silence you can “hear wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air! Listen! The waterfall of birdsong by those trees!”
All the while Doug keeps thinking that whatever it is that’s been following them is going to show itself, but it hangs back. As his little brother Tom happily reels off a record of all the baseball games they played over the last three years – one thousand five hundred sixty-eight games – and how many times he brushed his teeth in his ten years – six thousand – and how many peaches he ate – six hundred – Doug gets the urge to tell him to be quiet because whatever is coming for them is right there, breathing on his neck, so close he’s about to finally see it.
But then he realized that whatever it is, it’s not scared of Tom – Tom was a part of it! So he playfully tackles his brother and they wrestle and thrash about, hollering and laughing. When the play fight is over, Douglas opens his eyes, afraid he’ll find nothing.
Instead, he finds that “everything, absolutely everything was there.”
He feels his fingers trembling, the grass whispering beneath his body, the wind sighing over his ears. Flowers bright as the sun are all around him and up above birds like skipped stones flicker across the sky while insects shock the air with their electric strangeness. The whole world reveals itself to Doug in that revelatory moment.
I’m really alive, he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember! He yelled it loud but silent, a dozen times! Think of it, think of it! Twelve years old and only now! Now discovering this rare timepiece, this clock gold-bright and guaranteed to run threescore and ten, left under a tree and found while wrestling.
This moment sets the tone for the entire book. Here, the ordinary will be treated as extraordinary. The simplest things – a bottle of dandelion wine, a new pair of shoes, a farewell to an old trolley – are imbued with a weight of mystery and depth of meaning.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012) was an American author best known for his work in speculative fiction. His stories blend elements of science fiction, horror, and lyrical realism, with a prose style that regularly makes me close my eyes and sigh at its sheer beauty. Though often considered a sci-fi writer, Bradbury’s writing is more concerned with humanity’s soul than with technology, and his work often returns to memory, childhood, and the wonder of life itself.
Dandelion Wine is my favorite of all his books. It is a deeply personal ode to Bradbury’s own childhood in Waukegan, Illinois. What I love best about this book is that it sweeps the whole expanse of life – from the antics of children to the porch-sitting contemplation of the elderly – into its embrace. It is a reminder that we were once children and one day we will (if we are lucky) be old. And being old is okay, even death is okay, because it’s all part of it. The good and the bad, the fear and the joy, the growing and the dying; it’s all sanctified and glorious and good.
Bradbury’s spiritual beliefs were quixotic. He was raised Baptist but as an adult took spiritual inspiration from both the East and West, describing himself sometimes as a Buddhist, though he seemed to retain a belief in a personal God.
It was God whom he credited for his writing, saying in an interview that he will reread his own writing and “sit there and cry because I haven’t done anything of this. It’s a God-given thing, and I'm so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is, 'At play in the fields of the Lord.' "
A Guidebook to Enchanted Living
Dandelion Wine is a vivid summons back into the enchanted texture of childhood. Here, ordinary things brim with meaning and life is experienced with an almost supernatural intensity. Doug and his brother Tom and their friends are not yet alienated from their natural inclination toward enchantment; they walk the streets at dusk and feel the gentle fabric of the world settling and know themselves to be embedded in something profound and meaningful. In an age of over-stimulation and disconnection, Dandelion Wine reminds us what it means to be truly awake to the world.
Bradbury’s prose is saturated with wonder in a way that invites us to remember this lost mode of consciousness, a time in our own lives when wonder came easily. Bradbury wrote it to honor his own childhood, yes, but also to preserve something that was vanishing – the sense that life, in this very mundane moment, is sacred. Nearly a hundred years after the summer it depicts, nearly seventy after it was published, Dandelion Wine remains a radiant masterpiece that calls us to recognize that one summer in one small town can contain the whole universe.
We live in a world that prizes irony, speed, and detachment. Dandelion Wine is the opposite of all that. It is slow, sincere, and utterly unashamed of its wonder. It is not a fantasy novel, but it is a guidebook to enchanted living that makes a beguiling argument for the value of slowing down and finding deep mystery in the familiar. It invites you to do again what you did as a child: to listen for what the wind might be whispering in the trees, to notice how wild and green is the smell of fresh cut grass, to remember the taste of sunlight and the heady glow of laughter.
And so I am asking you to consider reading Dandelion Wine this summer. It is one of the most life-affirming, joyous, books I know.