Back in March we launched our first East Lothian Libraries Creative Writing Competition with the themes 'Hopes and Dreams.' It has been such a strange and difficult 18 months we wanted to hear about your hopes for the future or how your dreams have perhaps changed because of recent events. We knew for certain that the incredible writing talent of East Lothian would interpret this theme in such different ways but maybe we were not quite prepared for how you would pull at our hearts and make us fall in love with your writing.
A huge thank you to everyone who entered, we enjoyed reading all the entries and were able to compile a very tough shortlist. From this, an even tougher decision of three winners. Congratulations to everyone. The winner ‘Dandelion Wishes’ is posted below. We hope you love it. We do!
First: Fern Adams, 'Dandelion Wishes,'
Second: Alexandra Davey, 'A Mothers Dream'
Third: Sadie Maskery 'Hopes & Dreams'
Dandelion Wishes
I look, this Spring, at the dandelion flowers as they spring up in amongst the grass blades. They are yellow now, like small spiky suns. Soon they will change and turn into dandelion clocks. From clocks they will become wishes. Wishes blown into the air to carry our hopes and dreams away into the future. They will settle on the earth somewhere and then some, next year, will poke up amongst the soil, yellow heads bobbing and bowing in the sunshine. Others won’t make it. They will fail to take root. In the same way some of those wishes will fly and come to life and others will fall by the wayside. I like to think the yellow flowers we see next year are the wishes that did not come to pass and that the ones that will never form a new life have not failed in their mission but instead become the hopes and dreams that have come true, that each goes onto fulfil something. That nothing is wasted.
When I was three I sent dandelion wishes floating up into the air sending hopes with them that I would soon be five. When you are five, I thought, you are fully grown up. You can move out at five into your own flat. You can eat pizza every night. You can go to bed when you want even after the moon has reached its arc in the sky. You can do all this at five because, being grown up, there will be nobody to tell you otherwise.
When I was five, I decided to wait to grow up a bit more and stay at home for longer. Instead I spent the summer wishing on dandelions for something grander. I wanted the skies and the stars. I dreamed of being an astronaut. I emailed NASA and let them know that was my plan and I would be free in about ten years’ time to help.
Ten years later, at fifteen, the wishes of dandelion clocks seemed childish. Space seemed so far away. Magic was a thing to be scorned, nature was largely ignored, science held no more purpose than an exam sheet to study for. Still on summer nights we made hopes and dreams and planned for elaborate futures. We wished our hopes through dandelion seeds in secret, hoping despite our outward denial in them, they would still take root. At fifteen I wished to be an adult, to know everything there could be to know.
As an adult I realised that I knew nothing at all. That everything was so vast and that each piece of knowledge led to more questions, queries and things I wanted to learn about. I no longer cared about being too old for dandelion wishes and was young enough once more make new hopes and dreams and believe in them. I made elaborate five and ten year plans, had it all mapped out ahead like a stem leading onwards and upwards and reaching to the sky.
The thing is the best of plans and dreams can become interrupted. We can be woken up from them with unexpected starts. Dandelion seeds caught up within the spider webs of reality that they are blown into. Coronavirus changed dreams for so many, me included. We found our hopes and dreams on hold, altered or questioned. We dreamed instead of a vaccine, of lock downs lifting, of shielding restrictions reaching an end. We hoped for simple things; a hug, a hair cut, a morning commute, a coffee with a friend. Dandelion wishes took on so many different shapes to how they had before. They took off in the breeze taking simpler hopes and dreams with them. Wishes that might be smaller in size but were heartfelt all the more for their authenticity and the need for connection behind them. We ardently hoped with the new spring they would have planted a change for us all.
That spring has now arrived and as I sit and look at dandelions coming up from the soil, as I see photos of sleeves rolled up as vaccination hopes take root- I think is it so silly to wish our dreams on dandelion seeds after all? Each year spring will occur and yellow flowers bloom, resilient from the cold frosts and muffling snow falls. They work away under the soil regardless of all that happens around them. They form deep roots and push up, up against gravity and the dark despair of the soil. They cannot see the sun but they know it is there. In their plant like way they have dreams of becoming flowers and hopes of seeing the sunlight. They do all this year after year and when they do emerge from the layers of underground toil they in turn bring us hope, reminding us we can plan again. That no matter what, the seasons continue and we will keep working towards the future throughout them.
This year, the first yellow leaves are starting to fall away, they unfurl in the sun and leave behind a trace of themselves in a halo of seeds. I pluck one from the ground and lift the stem, examining it closely. A hundred or more seeds connected together, waiting to float along in the breeze. A hundred or more chances at a new future. A hundred or more chances at the hopes and dreams I sail along with them to become true. I think about what I want most, what the world needs the most, what matters the most. Then I lift up the dandelion clock to my mouth and gently puff out air, watching it disperse into fragments, each piece carried gently away. I hope as the wind moves them along it will ventilate the dreams behind them, make them substantial and they will root themselves in the future. As for what I wished for this time… well… that is between me and the dandelion.
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