Planting Dandelions Read Online Free

did matter. There was a gate in the fence that hadn’t existed for me before, and it swung open as I walked up to it. Thus I entered matrimony, in full faith for the first time—soberly, advisedly, and in complete accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted. Wearing no panties and married by a witch.

2.
    Meet the Sunshines
    I ’m too selfish to have kids,” I told my mother a few years before my first child was born, sitting at a wrought-iron table, exhaling smoke and affecting world-weariness, like we were outside a café in Montparnasse and not an ice cream parlor in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I was baiting her, as daughters in their twenties do when mothers come visiting, but I secretly worried it was true. I was not very maternal as a child. The attention I gave to my dolls was erratic and occasionally catastrophic, like the time I fed Baby Alive mashed leftovers after the packets of synthetic baby food ran out. She became constipated and moldy, and eventually bugs hatched inside her motorized bowels. It was truly gross negligence. My Barbie dolls were just plain abused. I gave them garish makeovers with felt-tip markers, back-combed their long silken hair into frizzy blond Afros, and left them lying around naked, like skid-row floozies passed out on bathtub gin.
    Then there was the Sunshine Family: Steve, Stephie, and their baby, Sweets. They were packaged as harmless, peace-loving hippies, but the constricted pupils in their vacant, round eyes suggested they might be a family the way the Mansons were a family. “Welcome to the warm world of The Sunshines,” the back of the box said. Please leave your legal name and all your worldly attachments behind.
    The Sunshines’ world was not all that warm. According to my mother, who overheard me playing with them, Steve and Stephie were constantly bickering.
    â€œGet the baby!”
    â€œIt’s your turn!”
    â€œI do everything!”
    Poor Sweets. Poor Barbie, and poor, poor Baby Alive. If there had been a Department of Doll Social Services, they’d all have been taken away.

    I got pregnant barely six months after I married Patrick. It was planned, but only for about five minutes in advance of conception. I had gone for a walk near the river and came back to our apartment with a four-leaf clover in my hand. I held it out to Patrick, and joked that it must be a sign, since it was Mother’s Day, and thought I was probably ovulating. I was chronically forgetful about taking birth control pills. “There’s a full moon tonight, too,” I teased. “If we ever wanted to make a baby, now would be the time.”
    What Patrick heard was, “Let’s have sex now.”
    I knew the moment we conceived. I knew in the same instant that I deeply wanted a baby. It seemed like a wish that was so new and tender called for some kind of reinforcement, so later that night, I made Patrick walk with me in the moonlight through a nearby wooded park, to an ancient oak, at the base of which I buried a little nautilus shell, an improvised symbol of protection for the tiny life I was sure flickered inside.
    â€œThis is pretty witchy,” Patrick observed.
    â€œIt’s asking a blessing,” I said with authority, though I wasn’t sure of whom we were asking it. I didn’t believe in religion, but I was a poet, and I believed in its etymology, religare : to bind, to fasten. I was tethering a soul to my body. I whispered a prayer that our child would be blessed in every way, then we walked out of the woods, laughing and feeling high.
    The next day, the signs seemed less clear. Maybe I was pregnant, but then again, why give up happy hour on the basis of hunches and superstition? It hardly seemed prudent. But I substituted sips of wine for swilling bourbon, and counted off the days before I could take a home pregnancy test and find out for sure. Fourteen days after the night of the full moon, I peed on a