56 pages • 1 hour read
Dandelion Wine
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Themes
The Magic of Everyday Things
At the opening of the novel, Douglas experiences a spiritual epiphany that becomes the central idea holding the various episodes of the story together: an enthralled appreciation for the fact that he is alive: truly alive. In this moment, the sky and trees and air and aromas of nature all conspire to turn up the volume on Douglas’s senses. He knows immediately that this will be a guiding principle of his life. The realization is so intense that it changes him forever, enlightening Douglas enough to fully appreciate the wonders of the everyday world that surround him, and he promises himself to always be aware of the beauty to be found in the ordinary.
Embracing the intensity of life’s wonders also means feeling deeply its disappointments, and Douglas learns this harsh lesson in many different ways as the summer of 1928 inflicts him with losses and grief even as it grants him many treasures and good memories. For example, Douglas’s friend John Huff must leave abruptly with his family, and both Colonel Freeleigh and Great-Grandma die unexpectedly. Each time, Douglas struggles with the losses—which, piled atop other bad things he experiences during the summer, cause him so much stress that he becomes deathly ill. He survives his illness, however, and as he stands fully recovered in his grandmother’s kitchen, he realizes how much he loves the ordinary things of life, for even the condiments call out to him with names like “Relish” and “Savory.”
Douglas understands that to be truly alive, one must pay attention to the beauty in small things, and not to sleepwalk through life like most people do. He works this awareness deeply into everything he sees and does, and he tries to glean the utmost from each object and activity, whether it be wondrous or painful. He discovers, during the summer of 1928, that life is to be lived rather than endured, appreciated rather than begrudged. “Alive” becomes the watchword of the story, and Douglas becomes an expert in its every nuance.
The Unstoppable Passage of Time
During the summer of 1928, Douglas already knows how to enjoy his favorite moments, and he loves personal and family traditions for their ability to highlight the good times—the bottling of dandelion wine, or waking in his grandparents’ cupola to the first dawn of summer, or a new pair of tennis shoes, or sitting on the porch in the evening with friends and relatives. However, Douglas struggles with heartbreak as many long-appreciated people, events, and things come to an end. His tennis shoes get old, the trolley gets replaced by buses, his best friend John Huff moves away, the ancient raconteur Colonel Freeleigh dies, and even Douglas’s Great-Grandma passes on. Thus, Douglas must come to terms with the fact that good things come to an end, people die, and loved ones move away.
Many of the book’s characters confront the relentless march of time in different ways, and Douglas in particular learns that the good things in life should be savored while they happen. Throughout the story, Douglas tries to reconcile life’s finalities with his newfound sense of aliveness. In his journal, he writes despairingly, “You can’t depend on things […] You can’t depend on people” (246-47). When he recovers from the illness that this despair causes within him, he finally accepts the passing of things dear to him and learns to appreciate things while they’re here. He even begins to take actions to protect the things he loves, such as helping his Grandma recover her ability to cook delectable meals.
Meanwhile, many other Green Town locals must also confront the endings forced by the passage of time. Elderly Mrs. Bentley keeps mementos of her younger life stored away in trunks until the disbelief of young children at her assertions of once having been a child herself compel her to stop clinging to a past she can never recover. Instead, she learns to live in the present: the only place where good things really happen. Similarly, Bill Forrester becomes enchanted with the elderly Helen Loomis, then must stand by helplessly when she dies. He is left only with the hope that he might meet her again in another life.
Even the world’s best inventions are no match for the time-honored methods of savoring life’s sweetness, and this truth is reflected when Grandpa rejects newfangled lawn grass that doesn’t need tending and Leo Auffmann fails to create a Happiness Machine that can provide him with happier experiences than he already enjoys with his family. As Douglas and others learn, it’s often better, not to fix things that already work but instead to enjoy them while they still exist. They discover that their best option is simply to pay loving attention to the passing pageant of life, lest they regret missing out on its colorful wonders of life during the short time in which they’re in bloom.
Memory as an Act of Preservation
Without memory, nothing has meaning, and the best experiences fall into oblivion. To capture and retain their happy summer experiences, Douglas and his family take many different measures to remember and preserve the good times, and dandelion wine becomes a key symbol of this larger philosophy. Grandpa makes wine from the dandelions that Douglas and Tom collect and bottles the result, one bottle for each day of summer. In the winter, the family opens a bottle now and then, sips from it, and remembers the events of that day. Though memories are never perfect, the boys promise themselves to remember every detail of this extraordinary summer. Tom memorizes the quantities of things he has done, and Douglas writes down his experiences in a journal.
Another sentinel of preserved memories is old Colonel Freeleigh, a Civil War veteran who tells the boys the most thrilling stories of his heyday. By passing along his life memories to the boys, the colonel not only relives the excitements of his youth, but he also ensures that something of himself will live on in the eager young minds of those who sit before him and marvel at his stories. Ultimately, it is the savoring of the best moments of Colonel Freeleigh’s life that helps to keep him alive; once deprived of all access to his memories by misguided but well-meaning caretakers, he loses his will to live entirely. In this, Bradbury conveys a vital message to his readers, for Freeleigh knows that memories are fallible, and that distance makes them fade. As he says, “When you are away from a city, it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance […] All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another” (177). Freeleigh’s memories are the very essence of his identity. Without them, he doesn’t exist at all, and it therefore becomes impossible to preserve his own life any longer. His final act is to call an old friend in Mexico City who holds the phone up to the window so that Freeleigh can listen, one last time, to the sounds of a favorite place in his long life.
Many other characters have their own run-ins with the realization that life and identity can only be sustained and preserved through some form of memory. For example, the day he must move away from Green Town, 12-year-old John Huff worries that his entire childhood will disappear because he’ll forget its details. Just before he parts with Douglas, each boy spends a few minutes walking around the other, gazing at each other and burning the other’s appearance into memory as fiercely as possible. Similarly, Bill Forrester’s brief May-December romance focuses on Helen Loomis’s stories of her long, adventurous life, and Bill imagines them enjoying those events together. Together, they thus create a happy relationship that exists only in memories. For Douglas, memories are vital. Even when the summer of 1928 is “finished, done, and gone forever,” he can still retain “the sense of it all left here in his head” (319). Those memories connect him to his past; they form part of who he is, and he will carry their comfort with him into the future.
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By Ray Bradbury
