Dandelion Wine, Dandelion Greens, Dandelion Tonic

I'm trying to remember how old I was when I first read Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. Ten maybe? It was the first time that I read something that I knew wasn't true and yet was more true than true. Now, four decades later, walking through my yard trying to decide if I should weed the dandelions or make a nice liqueur from them, I'm remembering Dandelion Wine in surprising detail.

Do you remember Douglas, looking through the store window at a pair of Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes?

"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.

Douglas tried to get all this in words.

'Yes,' said Father, 'but what's wrong with last year's sneakers? Why can't you dig them out of the closet?' "

I'm now the parent wondering WHY my children can't dig last year's shoes out of the closet, but this brings back memories of how those first minutes of summer sound when school lets out, and the way your body feels when you wake up with absolutely nothing to do while cicadas are chickering in the long grasses, and the sky is impossibly, almost painfully blue.

I decide not to weed the dandelions but to eat and drink them. I walk outside with a glass jar and small scissors and walk through my yard snipping off the bright yellow flower heads and letting them fall into my jar. I bring the jar inside and go back out with a salad bowl, pulling off any tender, bright green leaves from the dandelions. (I don't use any pesticides -- if you do, maybe think twice before eating greens from your overgrown lawn.)

I have the flowers in a large glass measuring cup and I pour on a good amount of vodka. I add just a few teaspoons of sugar and two long strips of lemon peel, with the white pith scraped off. I pour all this into a large clean glass jar, screw on the lid and put it away in the back of my pantry. (I have no idea how this will taste -- stay tuned.)

Then I rinse and dry the dandelion leaves. I pour about 1 tablespoon of EVOO into a pan, add 2 minced garlic cloves, let it cook for about 30 seconds and then add the dandelion leaves -- about 1 1/2 cups of them. I add a little bit of lemon zest and a bunch of chopped fresh parsley leaves, and heat for another 10 or 20 seconds. I chop up a few roasted almonds and throw them on top. I taste it. It's good but there's something missing. I take my bowl of greens outside and carefully balance it on a tree limb while I climb up into the kids' treehouse. (This is harder than it sounds.) I sit down with my bowl so I can kick my legs while looking out over the fields, which are just turning from pale green to gold. The dandelions are about as good as greens can get (which is to say a lime popsicle would be more appropriate) but just for a minute I'm the same person I was when I was ten years old and summer stretched ahead so far forward that you couldn't imagine school starting up again.

Happy summer to you.