White Parachutes

This past summer I had taken some time to begin reading a newly acquired book, and went to a nearby park to do so. Sometime thereafter I took a break from reading and noticed a gray mini-van pull into the parking lot. In short order, a young mother and her two young children, whom I estimated at between four and five years of age, emerged. The mother and her two little girls quickly made their way to a playground structure. The young mother sat on a nearby park bench and began reading a book, glancing up occasionally to track her youngsters. I, too, again, resumed reading. Time passed then I became aware that one of the little girls had wandered away from the “castle” to just a short distance from where I sat. She was studying a growth of dandelions. I closed my book and watched her as she became acquainted with the fluffy white dandelion seed balls perched atop the long green stems before her. I watched as she ruffled a few of the plants with a small tennis-shoe covered foot. The seed pods, loosened from their mooring, began to drift away. She repeated the action with the same results. The little girl bent over and touched more of the remaining fluff balls. She pulled another of the stems free. In the process of studying them, she rubbed them across her cheek. A smile instantly appeared on her little round face. She waved the stem in the air and the seed pods flew off in a semi-circle around her. Her smile became a giggle. When the stem became void of whiteness, she picked another. As she played, a breeze came by, and the seed-ball parachutes drifted off and away from her. Her gaze followed them. She chased them, trying to catch them as the whiffs of wind, carried them up, then down, then sideways. She continued these antics for some time, giggling constantly at the wonders she had discovered, then wandered off in search of more wonderments. I found that I, too, had developed a smile on my much older, markedly more wrinkled face. My mind drifted back over the years to a little boy who marveled at the ability of tiny white airborne “parachute” puffs to ride, apparently unassisted, over the air, while running after them to see just where they were going. It appears some of the smallest joy-generating things in life are, indeed, both free and cyclical, and I had just witnessed repeated proof of that … an observation that was more revealing and longer-lasting than the book I read that day.