Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury

Have you ever had a good cup of coffee? Not the stale kind you drink from the gas station when you’ve

got an hour more to drive to get home and you have to keep your eyes open. I mean the kind of coffee that you brew and then sit down to simply enjoy. It’s bitter and smooth, and maybe it’s black or maybe creamy, but it warms your insides and leaves you happier than when you started drinking it. And that is what reading Ray Bradbury is like, especially his book Dandelion Wine.

Bradbury is the best short story writer ever. (Don’t agree? Too bad.) Dandelion Wine is composed of many tales that join into a cohesive story of the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illinois. Douglas Spaulding, aged 12, helps his grandparents make dandelion wine with the fresh dandelions of summer. And Doug knows that all of them, come winter, will slip down to the basement and have a sip of this distilled summer to brighten up the cold, dark days of winter. And throughout the rest of the book the theme carries of summer preserved, that abundant bursting of life, distilled and saved up to help through the darker times.

Additionally, we visit two spinsters, stricken with guilt over their behavior while driving their electric green machine. Leo Auckman, resident inventor, decides to make a Happiness Machine, much to the dismay of his wife. Douglas Spaulding discovers what it means to be alive. The boys discover the oldest man in town is brimming with stories that make him into a living, breathing time machine.

It's a full picture of life and death that Bradbury paints. If coffee weren’t bitter, it wouldn’t be quite as good. And so Ray Bradbury without the darkness in his work, would be simply sappy. The Lonely One is deep in the ravine, right there in the middle of life and laughter. Friends leave. Time erases trolleys, people, stories. History fades. Summer ends. But there’s always Dandelion Wine to help us remember the summer days and preserve us through the winter.