Dandelion

My father and I had this game. I'm no longer sure when it started. I was not yet old enough to realize that there could be a time before things happened. The goal was to find a dandelion in bloom each month. When we hit April, it might have been more a game not to see them intruding through the mulch of my mother's gardens. Come December and January, there was a real sport to finding living dandelions.

When I was a little girl, five or six, I had the bright idea of digging up a patch of them, transplanting them in a pot like the proper flowers my mother grew throughout the house, no matter the season. She always had a green thumb. You couldn't keep dandelions off our lawn in the spring, but they couldn't thrive on my windowsill through the Christmas season. I never even had the chance to gloat to my father that I hardly needed to get out of bed to see them on Valentine's Day.

I don't know what went wrong exactly, except I took after my father. My mother used to joke that she and I were the only living things that didn't wilt around him. I don't want to think too long about that. Once, he won me a carnival goldfish, tossing ping-pong balls in a bowl for the prize. Its bowl barely sat down on the kitchen table before the fish floated belly up and got an all-expenses-paid trip through our plumbing for its trouble.

We never picked the yellow dandelions. He never said as much, but it seemed wrong to do. I knew schoolyard kids who would, putting them under their chin, gauging from the warm glow that they liked butter - though everyone with sense knows only buttercups will suffice for that. Yellow dandelions aren't good for any games beyond spotting them. You can't pull their petals to determine if someone loves you or loves you not. They are insufficient in bouquets for imaginary weddings. Even Little Bunny Foo Foo thinks better of bopping them on the head, though. Regrettably, Momma thinks little of popping off baby heads represented by unlucky flower tops. The only thing they are halfway good for is wishes, and for that, you have to let them grow white.

My father would gather a handful and let me blow them into the wind for the first wish of the season. My desires were always selfish. I am an only child and knew no other way. After that cloud of seeds scattered to the wind, he'd chase me around with the threat of blowing them at me, me madly giggling until I could return fire.

In a house with the two of us, it was nothing short of a miracle that my mother lasted as long as she did. I was away at college when my father got the prognosis. They waited until after my midterms to tell me, a kindness for which I do not know that I will ever forgive them. I did not deserve the luxury of commonplace worries when my mother was dying, but they gave me weeks more of these. The lawn was brown when I returned, but a patch of dandelions remained by the porch until I stepped on them for spite. How dare anything bloom now? All her plants were gone even within the house to avoid interfering with her chemotherapy. It looked like the skeleton of my home.

My mother told me that I needed to finish the semester strong, so I went back to grant the final wish she would make of me. She was dead by winter break. I have to believe she held out until she knew classes finished, so stubborn was she. I know my father tried to be there for me, but I tried harder to be there for him. He had never been without my mother's nurturing so long as I had been alive. I doubted he would bloom again. he looked at me with haunted eyes when I asked if he had seen any dandelions.

My mother had drawn up a contract with a local funeral home. She had known how fumbling we would be in the presence of her loss. My father had only ever seemed like a playmate to me. She had been my parent. She had tended to my growth, kept me fed, gave me light. I would never feel so cared for again, and my father knew it.

It snowed the day of her funeral, covering the ground in a white blanket. The cold reached even to my bones. I shivered as I exited my car before the anesthetic architecture of the funeral home.

I walked into the room where her coffin lay and dropped into a chair as though stunned. Around her casket were thousands of dandelions, more yellow and vibrant than the sun.

My father placed his arm over my shoulder. I let myself cry into his chest.