I had a visit from royalty the other day.
The Dandelion Queen burst into my office with all the energy of a Category Four hurricane, running into my outstretched arms as she has since she was a tiny girl. She’s now at that almost-awkward stage (she turns ten this year) where she’s somewhere between a little kid and young lady, but she still loves me like I love her, and there’s a still a lot of little kid in her, despite the looming specter of adolescence and boys.
We only had a few minutes to visit, since her baby sister was getting hungry, but every moment with my little buddy is special. Whether we are watching funny animal videos (which I try to limit) or wandering around the yard looking for rocks, sticks and bugs (which I encourage) each moment is priceless. Never having any blood children of my own, I try to make up for lost time as a chosen grampa.
She’s too big for me to read bedtime stories with anymore – and that’s the job for her parents, anyway – but we can share other stories now, stories about school and animals and all the things that make up a little kid’s life. I inevitably cough up a few quarters, since that’s apparently what grampas do, and she inevitably carefully shares whatever candy the vending machine distributes, since she wants to share everything with everyone, from news about axolotls to shiny rocks.
The Queen likes to see people happy, and she seeks out ways to make them happier. I have dozens of shiny driveway rocks and other trinkets she has collected for me through the years. Yes, I kept every single one. An uninformed observer might think I had befriended an entire murder of crows. When she found smooth glass decorator pebbles strewn through my office parking lot in a flood, you’d have thought there could be no happier child in the world.
Her drawings are proudly displayed on the board behind my office chair. Tucked away in my wallet I have a recipe she wrote when she was six (it shows how to make a spice she thought would go better with our lunch that day).
She earned her name when she would race down the road beside me every morning on my way to work (carefully staying across the ditch), dandelions streaming in her wake. She’d hear my truck come out the gate, and be waiting when I got near her house. At her behest I am fairly sure we spread enough dandelions to engulf most of the cornfields in my community. The Queen really likes her dandelions, especially when their seeds are flying through the air like snow.
The Queen likes to run with my hounds and goats, a complicated game with intricate rules that only goats, dogs and children understand, but they all seem to understand each other. She is a young lady, but she’s also not ashamed to get her skirt a little dirty, especially if it means she can whirl around in a circle and hide in a dust cloud.
I have a photo on my wall of her holding a woolyworm that she rescued from the chickens; she has the mind of a young scientist, whimsy aside, since the other day she told me that she had found out what kind of moths start out life as woolyworms, and that she had seen such a moth at her house. Then the whimsy returned and she wondered if it might be at least related to the one she rescued.
The Queen has a sense of fair play as well as mercy; she’s not afraid of snakes and spiders, and knows they have a place in nature. She also knows what the “bad” ones look like, and she isn’t afraid to deal with threats to pets or other people in a swift, decisive manner. She tries not to do so, however, since every life is precious.
One Sunday afternoon, as she was chasing or being chased by my dogs Lauren and Jack, we heard a wailing scream in the side pasture where the Queen picks wild strawberries.
Her mother and I dashed over and Miss Rhonda came out on the porch (it was baby season, so she was feeding wild things) to see what was the matter. We were terrified that she had met a copperhead or rattlesnake, or otherwise hurt herself.
Her tears and wails were not for herself: a baby bird happened to fall from a tree, almost into the mouth of one of the dogs. There was but one or two feathers left to show the bird had ever existed. I’m not sure if it made things better or worse that Lauren wagged her tail and tried to wash the tears from her favorite little girl’s face, downy feathers on her muzzle and a Darwinian lack of regret when it comes to free snacks.
Once we ensured that the Queen was uninjured, her mother set about comforting her, explaining again that this was nature. Notwithstanding the fact that the Queen was willing to attack a venomous snake with little more than a rock and willpower, she was heartbroken. There was only one way to make her feel better.
I dug a tiny grave with my sheathe knife, and we buried the feather that the Queen managed to salvage. After carefully covering and marking the grave, we all said a short eulogy and a prayer. The little bird deserved that much, the Queen said, and she even forgave Lauren.
She was at my office one day when I had a call about a particularly nasty crime; when I got off the phone, she asked what had happened. As is my policy, I didn’t lie to her or try to put her off. I explained, without the gruesome details of course, that someone had gotten so angry with another person that someone got hurt. One was in jail, the other in hospital.
“Why did they want to do that?” she asked. I tried to explain that sometimes people used drugs or got drunk. Sometimes they listen to the devil instead of God, sometimes their mamas and daddies don’t raise them right, and sometimes they are just mean. My answer was insufficient.
“But why hurt somebody?” she insisted. “Why?”
I had to tell her I didn’t know. She accepted that, begrudgingly, and declared that if she was in charge of the world, people wouldn’t be allowed to be mean to each other anymore.
I have often said that we can learn a lot from little kids, how their innocent wisdom is often far superior to what we stupid grownups consider being smart. What we cannot learn from books or our own life experiences we often disregard as we grow up, and I ain’t entirely sure that’s a good thing.
Perhaps we all need to run with the hounds and the goats sometimes, or adopt woolyworms, and wonder of the magnificent moth of an autumn’s evening was the very one we adopted. Perhaps we all need to shed a tear sometimes for the littlest losses in nature, or pick up a shiny stone, or just turn circles in a dust cloud of our own making, all the while asking “why?” Perhaps we should all declare that if we were in charge, folks couldn’t be mean to each other anymore.
I can’t help but wonder if we wouldn’t all be better for it.
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