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“It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.��

I only needed to read the first paragraph of this beautifully written, evocative novel to guess it would be a favorite. I’ve also read enough reviews and sampled Bradbury’s writing personally to know that it had a better than fair chance to land on that esteemed shelf. This delivered what I needed amidst another restless, chaotic summer. It’s good to be reminded of those days when summer stretched endlessly and with such promise. Douglas and his brother and friends lived ordinary lives in small-town America, but the way they experienced their lives was nothing short of extraordinary and poignant when told with such delicious prose.

“Sitting on the summer-night porch was good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were rituals that were right and lasting; the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moved knitting needles in the dimness, the eating of foil-wrapped, chill Eskimo Pies, the coming and going of all the people.��

For a short time, while in the company of this book, I relived a bit of my own summertime childhood. I’ve never sipped on dandelion wine, yet I could taste its bittersweet tang and see its golden honey color. I remember running wild and unattended through the neighborhood, ending up in places that parents would likely have frowned upon. I recall strange sights and sounds, people that I didn’t know and to whom I attached my own little made-up stories. I remember overhearing the conversations of grown-ups while playing hide and seek at dusk with my sister and friends. They didn’t always make sense but they were often comforting, occasionally unsettling. And then there were the dark places that little children were afraid to get near. For us it was “the witch’s house�� and the street beyond the hill behind our own home. For Douglas and company, it was The Ravine. The Ravine represents more than just a shadowy chasm but also a figurative place one might cross when coming of age. This is the summer when Douglas will make that leap from childhood to adolescence and a greater understanding that the world is not always what it seems.

“There were a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins was the small towns�� music, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death.��

We might all grow up in different places, but the growing up itself, the coming to terms with what real life holds, is much the same the world over. The suffering and the heartache are there but hopefully the sweet promise of that dandelion wine will keep us going year after year. What else can we do?

“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 a glass to lip and tilting summer in.��