I remember dandelion greens. In the warming days of spring and the sweltering days of summer, dandelion greens – stewed, fried, sauteed, cold and crunchy with salt and vinegar in my favorite red-rimmed bowl – growing wild all around the hillside and down into valley. Sweating under the white hot sun, pulling dandelion greens from the thick, fragrant grass with my small, sticky hands beside my mother, stooped over to find the very best, the very plumpest, the very brightest.
I remember those days with my mother. Daddy worked nights at the mine, and he’d come home early in the morning covered from head to toe in coal dust. We’d wait for him together in the kitchen, eager and relieved to hear the roar of his engine coming up the driveway. He’d kick his boots off on the carport, and my mother would open the door for him and kiss his blackened cheek.
“Good night and good morning,” she’d tell him.
“Good morning, Daddy,” I’d pipe in from my spot at the table in the corner.
Mama named me Louise after her grandmother, but Daddy always called me Weed.
“I think you’re even taller than yesterday,” Daddy would say to me.
He’d smile at Mama, get cleaned up, and we’d eat our breakfast together before he went to bed for the day and my mother and I got to the important business of running the house. And in the early evenings, before he went back to work, we’d all sit down together for a dinner that Mama and I planted and gathered and cooked.
I knew plenty of other children whose fathers worked in the mine, and though we didn’t show it on the outside, on the inside, we were an anxious and sorry lot. I got used to seeing my friends pulled away from the classroom during the day, always for some tragic news. That, at least, I didn’t have to worry about. But the fear that Daddy wouldn’t come home in the morning, that we’d never sit at our little table and laugh over buttered grits and field greens again, that fear never left me.
“Can’t Daddy do something else?”
My constant question.
“What do you think he should do instead?”
My mother’s answer.
I didn’t know what he might do instead. But I sure knew that I’d rather have him home and safe, even if it meant we had to eat dandelion greens every day for the rest of our lives.
When eventually the inevitable happened, I can’t remember that I was surprised. We got the call in the early hours of the morning that there’d been an accident, and that Daddy had been injured. He was alive, which felt most important, but he’d be laid up for months. His back, Mama said.
“I’m fine,” he told us. “It’ll take more than some faulty equipment and a stroke of bad luck to lick me.”
Mama nodded, but picked at her fingernails. I said nothing.
Daddy must have seen the worry on my face, because he added, “You and me, Weed, we’re as hardy as they come.”
Mama got a job. She had to. But she told me it wouldn’t be so bad, and that I could come with her when I wasn’t in school, because she’d be watching a little boy about my age, and we could play together while she cleaned the house.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“You don’t know him,” my mother answered, “because he goes to school at home. He has his own teacher.”
“Is he nice?”
“I’m sure he is,” Mama said. “I’ve been told he has very good manners.”
I winced. Manners weren’t something we talked about all that much.
“Oh, don’t look like that, Louise. He’s not a different species. Y’all will get along just fine.”
Mama was hardly ever wrong, but no one’s right all the time.
The first day I met the boy, I found him sitting in his back yard, setting up empty cola bottles on the lip of an old stone well. On the covered porch, I saw a toy bow and arrow.
“You a good shot?” he asked me.
“Don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never tried.”
“I’ll show you,” he said. “I’m Malcolm.”
“Louise,” I answered.
“Wheeze?”
“No! Loo-eeze.”
“That’s a funny name,” he said.
“It isn’t,” I insisted.
“Well, I’ve never heard it before, so it must be,” he said.
Things did not improve from there. Malcolm was a good shot, and he tried to teach me, but he had a critique for every little thing I did, even beyond backyard archery.
“You’re eating your soup wrong,” he told me one day at lunch.
“What’s wrong with how I eat?”
And days later, “That’s not how you’re supposed to climb trees.”
“Well, why don’t you show me, if you’re so good at it,” I retorted.
“I’m not allowed,” he said. “But I know wrong when I see it.”
All the while, Mama worked away in his house, one of the largest in town, and she did it with a smile on her face, even when he only had a sneer for her.
“My mother says the curtains were dusty yesterday,” he told her one afternoon.
“Well,” my mother said, keeping her voice as mild and as even as I’d ever heard it, “I’ll make extra sure to get them clean today.”
Driving back to our own place that night, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer.
“Malcolm’s mean and snobby,” I told her. “I don’t know why you put up with him.”
“Louise,” she started.
But I couldn’t stop. “If I acted that way, you’d make me go and pull my own switch. He’s not nice, Mama.”
“I know that, honey,” she said. She brushed a hand through her hair. “But I’m going to tell you something important, so listen real close, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Sometimes, we have to do things we don’t like, and we have to put up with people we don’t like, because there are more important things than our feelings. Your daddy can’t work right now. We need money. I’d work for someone half as nice as Malcolm and his mother if I had to, because right now, that’s what I can do to take care of us. Understand?”
I nodded, my face aflame and shame radiating from every part of my body. Mama was always looking out for us.
“You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to,” she went on, “but I like knowing you’re close by. And maybe you can teach Malcolm a thing or two. You know, his world is real small, smaller than mine or yours or Daddy’s. His mother thinks that’s best, but maybe he’s mean because he doesn’t know any better.”
I went to work with Mama the next day resolved to do better myself, and I decided that I could start by trying to be nice to Malcolm. Maybe I could teach him something. And so when we went out back to play after lunch, I told him all about Mama’s garden and how we’d grow things to eat, and how I was learning to cook. And as I made us crowns out of white wildflowers, I told him all about dandelion greens.
“They’re kind of like these,” I said, and pointed to the flowers I was picking. “They grow wild, but they taste real good.”
While my fingers weaved delicate stems together, I told him about the afternoons Mama and I spent outside together, how that was our time to talk and sing and laugh, and how proud I was that Mama knew so much about plants and how to find the best ones. Then I popped the finished crowns on his head and mine and said, “We match!”
“You’re so weird, Louise,” he said. He got up and walked inside, and left me in his back yard to wonder what on earth I’d done wrong this time.
I didn’t go back to work with Mama the next day, or any of the days after that. While she was gone, I missed her fiercely. I looked after Daddy, and in the evenings, I made us dinner on my own, as best I could. Eventually, Malcolm’s family moved away.
“Somewhere up near Richmond,” Mama said.
Daddy got strong again and went back to work, and Mama and I resumed our usual routine. One day, out in the heat gathering stinging nettle for soup, I asked her: “Do you ever wonder what’ll happen to Malcolm?”
She stood up straight and thought for a moment. Then she said, “I imagine he’ll live some kind of life. Not like us, but it’ll be something.”
Sometimes, when I think back on those days, I wonder about Malcolm, about where he ended up and what kind of man he is today. I wonder about Mama and Daddy, too. I wish I could ask them questions. I wish I could go back, even for a minute, even for a second, and feel the hot sun on my back, the dew and dirt on my fingers. The fact of the matter is, we ate dandelion greens because they were free. They sprung up around us like lightning bugs in June, and it cost us nothing to gather food from our own land. Nothing but time.
I think back, and I wish I’d had more of that time. I’d spend hours now, if I could, picking dandelion greens. Maybe it’s true what they say, despite this mean old world and the people in it like Malcolm and his mother. Maybe the best things in life really are free.
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Thank you for reading! This is the sixth of twelve stories I’ll write for my 2023 Short Story Challenge. The theme this year is: Wild.
Here are the first five, if you’d like to read them:
I hope you join me and write some stories of your own this year! It’s fun, and I hope this will be a happy year full of good stories. But just reading is fine, too, and I’m glad you’re here.
The next story will be posted at the end of July.
A Virginia Writer's Diary 