The Little Seed That Wanted to Fly

Pip lived at the very top of a tall dandelion, along with ninety-nine other seeds.

All day, she watched the world below: bees bumbling from flower to flower, butterflies dancing in zigzags, birds swooping in great, graceful loops.

Everything was moving. Everything was going somewhere.

But Pip was stuck.

“I want to fly,” she told her sister seeds one morning.

“You’re a seed,” said her neighbor, Dot. “Seeds don’t fly. Seeds fall.”

“I don’t want to fall,” said Pip. “I want to fly.”

She watched the butterflies again. They were so light. So free. Their wings caught the sun like stained glass.

“Could you teach me?” Pip called down to a yellow butterfly below.

The butterfly tilted her head. “But you have no wings, little one.”

“I’ll find another way,” said Pip.

She tried leaning into the breeze. She stretched her feathery tuft as far as it would go.

Nothing.

She tried hopping — just a tiny hop — but her stem held tight.

She tried wishing very, very hard.

Still nothing.

The days passed. The dandelion’s head grew round and white and perfect. And one afternoon, a little girl came skipping through the meadow, spotted the dandelion, took a deep breath, and blew.

Whoooosh.

And Pip was off.

She spun. She swirled. She rose and rose and rose.

The ground fell away. The meadow grew small. She could see the whole curving hill, and the glinting river, and the red roofs of the village. She could see everything.

“I’m flying!” Pip laughed, though her voice was no louder than a whisper in the wind.

The breeze carried her over a garden where tomatoes grew fat and red. It carried her above a stone wall where a cat was sleeping in a stripe of sun. It carried her past a child’s open window, past a flag snapping at the top of a pole, past a flock of starlings that swooped around her in a living, murmuring wave.

She did not know where she was going.

She did not need to know.

The journey itself was the most magnificent thing she had ever felt.

Then the wind slowed. And Pip began — gently, gently — to fall.

She landed in a quiet corner of a garden, where the soil was dark and soft and smelled of rain. A robin watched her from a nearby branch.

“Is this where I belong?” Pip asked.

The robin hopped closer and pecked the earth beside her, as if to say: dig in.

So Pip did.

She sank into the warm, dark soil and felt something strange happen. Something she hadn’t expected.

It felt like home.

Weeks passed. The rain came and went. The sun warmed the earth above her. And one morning, Pip pushed — just the tiniest push — and broke through into the light.

She was a seedling. Small. Green. New.

She looked up at the sky and thought of her journey. The butterflies. The spinning. The rooftops and the wind and the robin’s knowing eye.

I flew, she thought. And now I belong here.

And slowly, over the weeks and months to come, she grew.

She grew tall.

She grew strong.

She grew into the most beautiful dandelion in that quiet garden corner.

And at the top of her head, one bright spring morning, a hundred tiny seeds appeared — each one with a feathery tuft and a wish of their own.

“Go,” Pip whispered to them as the wind came.

And they did.

The End.