Dandelion Wine.

I'm anxious for tomorrow and I can't sleep.

Now packed, having edited my new phone to satisfaction, and still unable to catch a Z, I've begun tending to some things I never tended to, but meant to.

Like straining the lees out from the dandelion wine I've been brewing.

I brought the dandelion wine up in another post, so I figure, since I can't sleep and I've got nothing better to do, I'll talk about it.

I've always liked dandelions. When I was a little boy, I remember playing in my Father's friend Dave's yard, and he had fields of them. Dandelions as far as my little legs could carry me, and a big dog who liked to play fetch.

Then, like all things young and carefree, it stopped, and I didn't like dandelions anymore. They became something to get rid of doing yardwork. Something with a funny name. Something to pick and disregard.

But then I read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and something seemed so happy and youthful about Clarisse McClellan running a dandelion under Guy Montag's chin to find out if he were in love.

My love-affair with the dandelion was quickly renewed.

I learned the greens are edible.

I learned they're a coffee-substitute if brewed.

I learned their name means "Lion's Teeth" and comes from the shape of the raggedy leaves at their base.

I learned they're lunar flowers associated with flirtation.

I learned they're a potent diuretic.

They're ripe for wine in May.

And I read Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine - a book about mortality.

When Onni died, I was proud to have done something about it. Everyone was kind of in a state of shock, and the details seemed to ebb and flow between concerned parties with little consensus. I gathered everyone. I explained what had happened. I apologized for keeping them all pacified when he had been hospitalized. And we mourned. And most of us wrote his mother, Iris, to show our support, condolences, and respect.

Pyon worried me when he said he might be on his last leg, too.

I wanted to be like I was with Onni for him. I didn't just want to prop my feet up and wonder what to do. To  hope for the best and let that be it, and I had been reading about some of the exploits on Kickstarter where people were fending for their goals with small handicrafts.

I decided if Shawn were to go, I would auction off a bottle of home-made dandelion wine, and give his parents the proceeds to help pay for his cremation.

I picked three pounds of them. I boiled them with sugar, ginger, and citrus. I strained them. I bottled them. I fermented them. I strained them more. And finally, I capped and wrapped it with some paper and twine.

I made a bottle, too, for when I settle-down, and another for Claire, the only person I know with an expertise on booze.

Here's the finished product.

It's kind of haphazard, I know, but I don't exactly have wine-bottles laying around. I used a glass soda-bottle, covered in paper and placed in a cool dresser upright with a balloon capped-over it to release the fermenting CO2 without contaminating it. I capped it, and now it's finished. I'm told that since glass doesn't expand under pressure, nor allow much to permeate it, it's ideal for wine.

The dandelions have all been exterminated now. Shortly after I picked the several pounds I needed to make the wine, a storm came and wilted all their sunny little heads.

It feels like I've bottled a secret corner of time - that odd junction between Spring and Summer - and hidden it to be enjoyed on some lonely Winter night.