Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine: Summary & Analysis
Dandelion wine was a story about a twelve-year old boy named, Douglas Spaulding. Douglas was just a typical twelve year old boy, who lived to play, run around and do what any other twelve year old would do. Not a very physically fit person, but it didn’t really seem to matter. He was a person who got what he wanted, not by whining for it, but by keeping his mind on whatever he wanted and setting out a goal for it. He was a happy boy and not many problems, till now, and he had a younger brother named Tom.
Tom Spaulding, age ten, did what other little brothers like to do, tag along with his older brother. He was never in the way of his older brother; in fact they liked being together. Tom took every day slowly, writing most everything down, the first day of summer, the first this, his first that.
Dandelion wine took place in a small town called Green Town, Illinois. In Green Town the Spauldings owned a patch of land that they grew dandelions on. Every summer, Douglas, Tom, and their grandfather would pick the dandelions and bottle it for wine. Summers in Green Town were very hot and winters cold. It was a town where almost everyone knew each other like a big family.
In this story many problems confronted Douglas. There were many deaths, Great-Grandma, Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh and Elizabeth Ramsal, which were friends and neighbors of Douglas. A good friend of Douglas, named John Huff, moved away to Milwaukee because of a job opportunity for his father. Also, Douglas got extremely sick and was dying and there was no information on what kind of illness he had. Douglas took these problems hard. To many things were going bad in too short of a time. His family was always there for him. He got well and soon forgot about the deaths in his life, he knew that there was nothing to be sad about and he was thankful that he did not die.
Both Douglas and Tom changed in a major way, they grew up. They both started to understand more, like old people were not always old and people do not live forever. They learned that there is a such thing as a Time Machine and that Time machines where old people, old people could tell you things so far back that it would be like riding a Time Machine. They now knew what it meant to live and to be alive and they appreciated it.
Dandelion wine was like a series of short stories that collided together at the end of the book. Nothing related to anything else until the end when, like a jigsaw puzzle, everything fit in its place. Douglas and Tom had been through a lot during the summer of 1928 and a lot had been through them. Now that summer was almost over and school was about to begin, they bottled the dandelion wine for the summer and all their problems had past for new ones to occur. Only the scenes of it was left in their heads, “and if they should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day.