Ray Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine has long been a favorite of mine. In one summer, the novel’s protagonist, twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding, encounters the richness of life.  The book opens with the announcement that he is allowed to sleep in his grandparents’ cupola one night a week during summer vacation, and upon waking, he performs a “ritual magic”—the waking up of a whole town by the pointing of his finger.  An excerpt from the novel reads:

There, and there.  Now over here, and here…

Yellow squares were cut in the dim morning earth as house lights winked slowly on.  A sprinkle of windows came suddenly alight miles off in dawn country.

“Everyone yawn. Everyone up.”

The great house stirred below.

 “Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass!”

He waited a decent interval. “Grandma and Great Grandma, fry hot cakes!”

The warm scent of fried batter rose in the drafty halls to stir the boarders, the aunts, the uncles, the visiting cousins, in their rooms.

Street where all the Old People live, wake up!  Miss Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh, Miss Bentley! Cough, get up, take pills, move around! Mr. Jonas, hitch up your horse, get your junk wagon out and around!”

And Douglas continues:

“Mom, Dad, Tom, wake up.”

Clock alarms tinkled faintly.  The courthouse clock boomed.  Birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing.  Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky.

The sun began to rise.

He folded his arms and smiled a magician’s smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell.  It’ll be a fine season.

He gave the town a last snap of his fingers.

Doors slammed open; people stepped out.

Summer 1928 began.

And so begins a tale, so rich in images, detail, rhythm and metaphor that once you read the novel, all the summers of your childhood and of the present become more vivid, as if each one is basking in Bradbury’s words and his happiness of really sensing the season.

About Douglas’ new pair of tennis shoes, Bradbury writes:

Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.

About a tumble in the grass between Douglas and his brother Tom when Douglas feels blood on his knuckles, Bradbury writes:

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.”

And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now.

I’m alive, he thought….

The grass whispered under his body.  He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes.  The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were suns and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland.  Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven.  His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire.

The summer he is twelve is going to be so delicious that Douglas wants to preserve it in a bottle the way his grandfather stores dandelion wine.  He thinks with bottled summer you could:

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Perhaps, by following Bradbury’s example, we can do what Douglas wishes for.

This week, try your hand at writing summer.

First, select a place you knew well as a child or know well now, a place where you were or are very attentive to how things happen.  Think of yourself directing the scene at a particular time of a particular day, dawn or dusk or afternoon, on a weekend or a weekday.  Your place might be filled with nature, or be a household at the beach, or a street where people escape the heat by sitting on the porches watching children play sidewalk games.

As you write the commands for what is to happen, remember to concentrate on what you would see and hear in the moment you have selected. Remember what might touch your skin or what reach your nostrils or tongue.  Write everything you remember as if you are commanding it to happen all over again.

Remembering my grandparents’ summer bungalow rental in the Catskills in New York State, I write:

Grandma, sit out front in a lawn chair on the grass and talk with the neighbors in Yiddish.  Tell me to watch out that I don’t get too near the edge of the lake. Grandpa, light your cigar and walk away from the talking and come back to give me a ride standing on your shoes.  Take me to find frogs.  Let me catch some and feel them slippery in my hands.  Mother, come out onto the porch and say it is bedtime. Aunt, sing out that tomorrow morning the baker will be by to pedal his Danish and donuts and that kids should sometimes have a breakfast of sugar. Leaves on the trees rustle me to sleep when the time comes for me to go inside after I collect fireflies to keep in a jar by my bed.  Fireflies glow off and on and off and on while I listen to the leaves. Sister, whisper about the horses you saw in the field.  Make the neighing sound you’ve learned and been practicing.

Second, when you have fully opened the scene of your summer in the way Bradbury had Douglas do, switch in your next paragraph to writing about something else that would have or does take place, whether it is the buying of special clothes, the eating of certain food, using particular equipment or enjoying specific entertainment.  Describe what this special item or event is made of, letting your imagination take over.

When you have finished at least one passage about what this thing or event is made of (the sinews of deer, loam and lots of winds for Douglas’ sneakers), write an “I” statement that pops into your mind.  Douglas says, “I’m alive.”  That might be your statement, but there are many others, too.  Find out where your writing leads.

Here is my next paragraph:

When Father arrives for the weekend in his black and white Chevy, he’ll take out the chocolate covered marble halvah he has brought, put it on a plate with a cutting knife.  We’ll sit around the table eating little squares of it, mopping up the crumbs we made on the flowered plate with our fingers.  The candy is straw on my tongue, the feeling of scrapped knees healed over or a chewed up thread come loose from the collar of a cotton shirt with no harm done.  I am calm and I am still.

From here, I might continue writing a personal essay about what growing up might have seemed to me then or what moment I was on the brink of just after that feeling of being still and calm, or I might write about the long journey back to that essence.

Wherever your Douglas Spaulding-like beginning leads, you will find something resonant to say about yourself, elicited from memories of summer.