Where the Dandelions Grow
Written by Magnolia Lemmon, Grade 11
Photo by PBS
A pet peeve that plagues the nation: don’t step on the cracks. Vast fields of light gray, rough cement are customary of every suburban landscape. The squares of pavement are laid down in yard-long blocks with minuscule valleys between each. Valleys are sometimes home to sidewalk vegetation, usually crabgrass and dandelions. When I was a child, my brother would walk with his head down, eyes fixated on the ground, so his little grey converse shoes wouldn’t make contact with any of the valleys. His mission: avoid the cracks at all cost, a sentiment carried by much of the world's population. I, on the other hand, whether it be from an untreated psychopathic tendency or some mutated gene, do not fear the valleys. To the contrary, I quite enjoy the feeling of my sole hovering between two blocks of cement, as if I were mending them, and for just a moment, both sides are one unified entity.
Out of the 6,251 days I have lived, I can’t forget this one. It was November 4th, 2016. The night before I slept soundly with the knowledge that the world was too good, too pure to let a Cheeto with a toupé into office. I woke up with the cool crisp mid autumn Mexican air tingling my cherry red cheeks. The fragrant smell of maple and cinnamon wafted up from the kitchen, so strong that I could taste my mom’s heavenly French toast. Wrapped tightly in my pink floral blanket, nothing in the world could harm me. Arthur, the yellow Labrador retriever that is plastered on much of my camera roll, rested gently at the foot of my bed snoring lightly. The first female president. Now that was a feat. First a Black man, then a woman; the world was sure headed in the right direction. I let my eyelids gently flutter and then close as the soft glow of the morning sun peeked through my window. Along with the light murmur of songbirds, I heard a tap on my door. My dad stood tall in the doorway, likely there to wake me up for school and tell me the good news. I knew the answer, but I asked anyway, “So, who won?” His brow was too furrowed and shoulders too slumped. The pause too long and his eyes too dark. “Your worst nightmare.” Then, he left.
My eyes locked on the door. No feeling was left in my body. My hands numb, my head numb, my heart numb. The cold air stung my blood red cheeks. My blanket strangled me. My dog pinned me. The icy sun glared at me through the window. A chill creeped its way from my neck and crawled down my spine worming its way into every crevice of my being. I was frozen. Helpless.
Faces full of morbid curiosity surrounded either side of the school hallway. They all carried an expression of horror and awe. They took brief intermissions from their gaze in my direction to exchange quick murmurs with nearby faces. Occasionally, a pair of feet would shuffle, like a child on the edge of a diving board, in my direction, followed by a rapid retreat and return to the cluster of faces and other feet. Each time the feet would scuttle a little closer to their destination, until one pair finally made it. She lifted her face in line with mine and asked, “Did you vote for him?” We were standing outside my seventh grade science classroom, me, an awkward thirteen-year-old dressed in odd-fitting neon shorts, forehead covered in acne, but this did not dissuade her from asking if I had voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 American Presidential Election. “No,” I answered. No, because I had no vote to cast, no because Trump is the personification of everything wrong in the world, and no because we weren’t even in America. She knew all this, but what she really wanted to know was if I believed what he said: there should be a wall between us. A crack in the pavement between me, an American, and her, a Mexican. The answer to that is also no. She retreated back to the cluster.
Above that wall, way up North, schools were filled with people of every color, but down here all their skin glowed a deep amber, all but a few. One of the faces that lined the hallway was peach white. It was framed by sun bleached golden hair and adorned with ocean blue eyes. Her parents were from above the border wall and had made the trip South to serve at the American consulate. Today her dad wore his bright red tie with the big bold print reading “Trump 2016.” Meanwhile, all my dad wore was a sunken expression. Her eyes didn’t harbor the same defeat that mine did; to the contrary, hers glowed with victory. We locked vision from across the hallway, the discrepancy in our emotion screaming over the silence. Then our gaze faltered and the valley between us grew wider and wider until it was more of a canyon and I could barely see her from my side. I passively watched my best friend drift further away as the great schism grew wider and deeper. I ached to see her again, but she became a speck in the distance. I let the schism push me off of my usual course in her direction to my first period science classroom. The same thing happened second period, and then third, and fourth until the lunch bell rang.
There it was, shaded by the rough foliage of a bushy green tree, surrounded by others just like it. Its vibrant red color stood out from the beige cobblestone floor it sat on. Little diamond-shaped holes permeated its surface. It was perfect. Each of its four sides fit one person and their lunch. This table had hosted my friends and me for the past three years quite amiably. But today, something was different. Only one person sat at the table this time, Annie. She resembled Sofia in the sense that she had the same cream white skin, blue crystal eyes, and sun kissed hair as Sofia; however, those ocean eyes carried the same sadness and defeat as mine. I sat across from her on my side of the table. “So where are Sofia and Rose?” I asked while unzipping my lunch box to reveal an assortment of stacked plastic containers. “I don’t know,” she said, looking down at her chicken quesadilla and poking it aimlessly. “Hum”. We didn’t have to exchange words to know what the other was thinking. Yesterday we were four friends, but today we were two Democrats and two Republicans.
I watched in my peripheral vision as Sofia sheepishly crept towards us, Rose trailing her flank. She took an unusual route to the table, preferring the edges of the landscape rather than the clearing. She would stop every now and then to camouflage into a trash can or bush. Not a moment after she made it into hearing distance did she lift her gaze, eyes wide, with fear, and muttered “Rose and I will sit over there”, gesturing to another table. She retreated before I had a chance to respond.
The two tables were miles apart. Two islands with a vast ocean between. Two trees with a forest in the middle. There was no seeing her from this side; furthermore, there was no hearing her. If I wanted to relay a message from my side, I would have to shout, and even then my voice would be muffled. All we could do was yell, and not even at each other, because God knows the other would be inaudible from this distance, but for our own pleasure of having said something. I
sat, a tiny ant on my side of the pavement, unable to communicate over the crack. The piercing cold down my spine, the numbness in my heart, I felt frozen again. But this time was different. This time I wasn’t helpless. I couldn’t do anything about the results of the election, but I could do something about its result on us. It didn’t have to be like this.
I stood up, and marched into the schism. I ducked under crabgrass and leaped over dandelions until my sole was precisely on top of the crack. I could see her again. She grew from a speck to a person until she was finally in earshot. “No. We have to sit together”. This wasn’t a question. This wasn’t a command either. It was simply the truth. So together we marched back to the table shaded by the green tree. We each sat on our side; we each took out our lunch. Then we began to talk. First about school, then drama, then politics. Not only did we talk, but we listened, and even better than that, we heard. We heard why Annie thought the spanish quiz had been way too hard,we heard how Rose planned on asking her crush to the dance, and we heard why Sofia wanted Trump to be president.
“My dad likes to talk a lot about politics,” Sofia started, her shoulders and forehead a little tense. “I know it’s stupid to believe something just because someone else told it to you…” she paused, her eyes wandering left and right as if searching for the right words in the green tree. She finished, “...but a lot of what my dad says makes sense to me. He told me about how some of his policies would lower taxes on my family up in Virginia, and how they need that money.” She continued, her words timid yet firm, “My family is Catholic, and I don’t know, but I just can’t find a way to support someone who justifies killing an unborn baby.” Although the last words made me flinch, and the urge to yell accumulated in my throat, I swallowed my anger. I knew that she believed in her opinion just as strongly as I did, so who was I to claim correctness on the matter. So, I decided to just listen. “I don’t like the way he talks about people, or the way he approaches every situation, but leadership is more about the action one takes, than the words one says.” I took a brief pause to ponder her point. She was right I suppose. Obama long ago did say that marriage should be between man and woman, but I was quick to forgive him when gay marriage was legalized during his presidency. It was hypocritical for me not to apply the same mercy to Trump. It was nice to know that she had reasons. Reasons that clearly made logical sense to her. She wasn’t some zombie hypnotized by an orange demon; she was still just Sofia.
“I hear you,” I said. “It's just….as a female of color, I feel that his character will play into his policies. I just want a president that will serve all people, not just the ones who agree with him.” There wasn’t an ounce of hatred in those ocean eyes, just a deep desire to wrap her head around where our ideas clashed so strongly that they could spark explosive national division. The problem was, that they didn’t clash. She and I had just said the same thing in two different ways: we wanted the best for people. It was only there in the middle that I understood how simple it really was. The terms we used to label one another just described the way in which we thought it best to help humanity. Because that is all any human wants; we want what is best for the world. We just had different approaches to getting there. “ I want that too,” she said earnestly.
A wave of relief, almost as refreshing as turning the AC on in a car that had been baking in a beach parking lot under the sun, washed over me. She was still Sophia, and I was just me. I peered directly into the center of those sapphire eyes and said, “Thank you for helping me understand.” Her shoulders dropped and the little wrinkle on her forehead softened. The little sheet of ice left between us melted until the warmth flooded in. Here in the middle we weren’t two Democrats and two Republicans, here we were four friends. Four friends who could speak, four friends who could hear, and four friends who could love each other even through our labels.
Most people avoid the cracks in the pavement. Not because they can’t step there, but because they have grown too accustomed to the feeling of cement on their feet and a change in texture would feel strange under their sole. It’s fear of the different. Fear of talking rather than yelling and fear of hearing rather than listening. Fear that the other might have something valuable to say. But one can’t see, one can’t learn, and one can’t grow from their side of the pavement. It’s scary to venture in between those blocks of pavement, but one must, because that is where we are just friends, because that is where we are just human, because that is where the dandelions grow.