Any other time Douglas might have laughed and denied it all. But now, when the great Thing was running near, falling down in the clear air above him, he could only nod, with his eyes shut.

As Tom didn’t get any reaction from his brother, he stopped picking berries and turned to him. Douglas, hunched over, was an ideal target. Tom jumped on him, yelling. They fell and rolled.

At first Douglas was afraid that the great Thing would be scared off, but no… it was all right! Their falling tumble had not scared off the tidal wave that crashed now, rolling them along the grass. Knuckles struck his mouth. He tasted warm blood, clutched Tom, held him tight, and so in silence they lay, breathing hard. Then, slowly, afraid he would find nothing, Douglas opened one eye.

And everything, absolutely everything, was there.

The world, like a gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to embrace everything, stared back at him.

And suddenly he understood what had jumped on him and it would not run away now.

I’m alive, he thought.

He let go of Tom and lay on his back holding his hand up and looking at his fingers through which the sun rays streamed making them look like a red flag.

The grass whispered under his body. The wind sighed over his ears. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts pulsating in his wrists, the real heart throbbing in his chest. The million pores on his body opened.

I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!

He yelled it loudly but silently, a dozen times! Twelve years old and only now discovering this rare timepiece, this gold-bright clock and guaranteed to run three-score and ten, left under a tree and found while wrestling.

“Doug, you okay?” asked Tom.

Douglas yelled, grabbed Tom, and rolled.

They rolled downhill, laughing till they cried.

“Doug, you’re not mad?”

“No, no!”Douglas said excitedly and then asked quietly, “Tom… does everyone in the world… know he’s alive?”

“Sure. Heck, yes!”

“I hope they do,” whispered Douglas. “Oh, I sure hope they know.”

Douglas looked at his father, who was standing high above him there in the green-leaved sky, laughing. Their eyes met. Douglas understood. Dad knows, he thought. It was all planned. He brought us here on purpose, so this could happen to me! He knows it all. And now he knows that I know.

Dad helped him to his feet. He swayed a little, still puzzled and awed. Then he looked at Dad and Tom.

“I’ll carry all the buckets,” he said. “This once, let me haul everything.”

They handed over their buckets with quizzical smiles.

He stood swaying slightly under the heavy weight of the buckets full ofjuicy forest riches. I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.

The bees followed and the smell of fox grapes and yellow summer followed as he walked through the forest toward that incredible highway which would take them back to the town. His brother and his quiet father followed behind.

Later in the day there was another harvest.

Grandfather stood on the wide front porch questioning the wind and the high sky and the lawn on which stood Douglas and Tom to question only him.

“Grandpa, are they ready? Now?”

Grandfather pinched his chin. “Five hundred, a thousand, two thousand easily. Yes, yes, a good supply. Pick ’em easy, pick ’em all. A dime for every sack delivered to the press!”

The boys smiled and started to pick the golden flowers. The flowers that flooded the world, dripped off lawns onto brick streets, tapped softly at crystal cellar windows and agitated themselves so that on all sides lay the dazzle and glitter of molten sun.

“Every year,” said Grandfather. “They run amok; I let them. Pride of lions in the yard. A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion.”

So, the dandelions in sacks were carried into the cellar, and its darkness glowed with their arrival. Grandfather operated the wine-press, and the golden tide, the essence of this fine fair month ranfrom the spout below. Then it was to be bottled in clean ketchup shakers and put in sparkling rows in cellar gloom.

Dandelion wine.

The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and sealed. Douglas was glad that now when he really knew he was alive, some of his new knowledge, some of this special vintage day would be sealed away and could be opened on a January day. The snow would be falling fast and there would be no sun for weeks, or months, and perhaps some of the miracle would be by then forgotten and in need of renewal. Since this was going to be a summer of unexpected wonders, he wanted it all saved and labeled so that any time he wished, he might go to the cellar, and there the rows of the dandelion wine would stand, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a light layer of dust on the bottles. Look through it at the wintryday – the snow melted to grass, the trees were in green leaf and blossoms again, and the sky turned from iron to blue.

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Even Grandma, one cold windy day in February, would vanish to the cellar.

Above, in the vast house, there would be coughings, sneezings, and groans, childish fevers, sore throats, red noses, the stealthy microbe everywhere.

Then, rising from the cellar like a June goddess, Grandma would come, something hidden but obvious under her shawl. This, carried to every miserable room, would be poured into neat glasses and swigged neatly. The medicines of another time, the balm of sun and idle August afternoons, the sounds of ice wagons passing on brick avenues, and of lawn mowers moving through ant countries, all these, all these in a glass.

Dandelion wine. Dandelion wine. Dandelion wine.

These fine and golden words would be repeated every winter for all the white winters in time. Saying them over and over on the lips, like a smile, like a sudden patch of sunlight in the dark.

The boys of summer were running. The grass sprang up again behind them. They passed like cloud shadows downhill.

Douglas, left behind, stopped at the edge of the ravine. This ravine divided the town in halves. Here civilization ceased. Here was only growing earth, and here were the paths, made or yet unmade, that told of the need of boys traveling, always traveling, to be men.

Douglas turned. This winding path led to the icehouse where winter lived on the yellow days. This path ran to the hot sands of the lake shore in July. This to trees where boys might grow like sour and still-green crab apples, hidden among leaves. This to peach orchard, grape arbor, watermelons lying like tortoise-shell cats sleeping in the sun. That path, now deserted, to school! This, straight as an arrow, to Saturday cowboy matinees. And this, by the creek waters, to wilderness beyond town…

Who could say where town or wilderness began? There was always and forever some indefinable place where the two struggled for possession of a certain avenue, a tree, a bush. Each night the wilderness, the meadows, the far country flowed down-creek through ravine and flowed up in town with a smell of grass and water, and the town was gone back to earth. And each morning a little more of the ravine inched up into town, threatening to sink garages like leaking rowboats, swallow ancient cars which had been left to the mercies of rain and therefore rust.

“Hey! Hey!” John Huff and Charlie Woodman ran through the mystery of ravine and town and time. “Hey!”

Douglas went slowly down the path. The ravine was indeed the place where you came to look at the two things of life, the ways of man and the ways of the natural world. The town was, after all, only a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, cutting the grass, chipping away the rust. Now and again a lifeboat, a shanty, related to the mother ship, lost out to the quiet storm of seasons, sank down in silent waves of termite and ant into swallowing ravine, and finally, in avalanche of shingle and tar, collapse into a bonfire, which thunderstorms ignited with blue lightning, while flash-photographing the triumph of the wilderness.

This mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, attracted Douglas. The towns never really won, they merely existed in calm danger, fully equipped with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man passed away and his equipment turned to flakes of rust.

The town. The wilderness. The houses. The ravine. Douglas looked around. But how to relate the two, make sense of the interchange when…

“Doug… come on… Doug…” The running boys vanished.

The first ritual of summer, the dandelion picking, the starting of the wine, was over. Now the second ritual waited for him to make the motions, but he stood very still.

“I’m alive,” thought Douglas. “But they’re more alive than me. How come?” He looked at his motionless feet and knew the answer…

That evening, on his way home from the show with his mother and father and his brother Tom, Douglas saw the tennis shoes in the bright store window. He looked quickly away, but his feet felt as if he was rushing, and the shop awnings flapped their canvas wings overhead because of the wind made by his body running. His mother and father and brother walked quietly on both sides of him.

“It was a nice movie,” said Mother.

Douglas murmured, “It was…”

It was June and long past time for buying the special shoes that were quiet as a summer rain falling on the walks. June and the earth full of life and everything everywhere in motion. The grass was still pouring in from the country, surrounding the sidewalks and the houses. Any moment the town would go down and leave not a stir in the clover and weeds. And here Douglas stood on the dead cement and the red-brick streets, hardly able to move.

“Dad! Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes…”

His father didn’t even turn. “Can you tell me why you need a new pair of sneakers?”

“Well…”

It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass.

“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”

Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. 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?”

Douglas felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, take off the leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the new pair of shoes. The magic might die by the first of September, but late June was still full of magic, and shoes like these could jump you over trees and rivers and houses. And if you wanted, they could jump you over fences and sidewalks and dogs.

“Don’t you see?” said Douglas. “I just can’t use last year’s pair.”

For last year’s pair were dead inside. They had been fine last year when he had started to wear them. But by the end of summer, every year, you always knew, you couldn’t really jump over rivers and trees and houses in them, and they were dead. But this was a new summer, and he felt that with this new pair of shoes, he could do anything, anything at all.

“Save your money,” said Dad. “In five or six weeks —”

“Summer’ll be over!”

That night Douglas lay watching his feet in the moonlight, free of the heavy winter shoes, the big lumps of winter fallen away from them.

“Reasons. I’ve got to think of reasons for the shoes.”

Well, first of all, the hills around town were full of friends. They were frightening away cows, playing barometer to the atmospheric changes, taking sun from dawn to sunset. To catch those friends, you must run much faster than foxes or squirrels. As for the town, it was full of enemies who got irritable with heat and remembered every winter argument and insult. Find friends, dump enemies! That was the Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot motto. Does the world run too fast? Want to catch up? Want to be agile, stay agile? Litefoot, then! Litefoot!”

He shook his coin bank and heard the faint small tinkling, the light weight of money there.

Whatever you want, he thought, you got to make your own way. During the night now, let’s find that path through the forest…

Downtown, the store lights went out. In his dreams he heard a rabbit running in the deep warm grass.

Old Mr. Sanderson moved through his shoe store as the owner of a pet shop must move through his shop touching each animal in passing. Mr. Sanderson brushed his hands over the shoes in the window, and some of them were like cats to him and some were like dogs; he touched each pair with care, adjusting laces, fixing tongues. Then he stopped in the center of the carpet and looked around, nodding.

There was a sound of growing thunder.

One moment, the door to Sanderson’s Shoe Emporium was empty. The next, Douglas Spaulding stood there, staring down at his leather shoes as if these heavy things could not be pulled up out of the cement. The thunder had stopped when his shoes stopped. Then, looking only at the money in his cupped hand, Douglas moved out of the bright sunlight of Saturday noon. He started to put nickels, dimes, and quarters on the counter and worried if the next move carried him out into sun or deep into shadow. “Don’t say a word!” said Mr. Sanderson.

Douglas froze.

“First, I know just what you want to buy,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Second, I see you every afternoon at my window; you think I don’t see? You’re wrong. Third, to give it its full name, you want the Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes: ‘LIKE MENTHOL ON YOUR FEET!’ Fourth, you want credit.”

“No!” cried Douglas. He was breathing hard, as if he’d run all night in his dreams. “I got something better than credit to offer!” Then he asked Mr. Sanderson when he himself had worn a pair of Litefoot sneakers.

Mr. Sanderson’s face darkened. “Oh, ten, twenty, say, thirty years ago. Why..?”

“Mr. Sanderson, don’t you think you owe it to your customers, sir, to at least try the tennis shoes you sell, for just one minute, so you know how they feel? People forget if they don’t keep testing things. United Cigar Store man smokes cigars, doesn’t he? Candy-store man tastes his own stuff, I think. So…”

“You can see,” said the old man, “I’m wearing shoes.”

“But not sneakers, sir! How are you going to sell sneakers if you cannot praise them and how are you going to praise them if you don’t know them?”

“Well…,” said Mr. Sanderson.

“Mr. Sanderson,” said Douglas, “you sell me something and I’ll sell you something just as valuable.”

The old man sighed but agreed to put on a pair of the sneakers.

“How do they feel?” asked the boy when Mr. Sanderson stood up.

“They feel fine.” He started to sit down.

“Please!” Douglas held out his hand. “Mr. Sanderson, now could you kind of rock back and forth a little, bounce kind of, while I tell you the rest? It’s this: I give you my money, you give me the shoes, I owe you a dollar. But, Mr. Sanderson, as soon as I get those shoes on, you know what happens?”

“What?”