When I was a child, I loved to explore in the fields behind my house.  During those childhood days, my friends and I would run freely through the countryside, building forts, and playing games in the trees and the long grass.  In the summertime, these fields would be filled with countless numbers of bright yellow dandelions.  I have a vivid memory of sunny summer days in which I would kneel down in the grass and carefully pick the most beautiful of dandelion flowers to create a flower chain that I could wear in my hair.  In my childhood innocence, when I looked at those fields, I never thought of these flowers as weeds.  Instead, I saw a magical place where every blossom represented a thousand wishes just waiting to be blown into the wind and whispered to the sky.

A Thousand Wishes
By Krista Longeway

I have a dearly cherished childhood memory 
Of a field with dandelions all around me, 
Their sunny yellow faces nodding in the breeze
The summer grasses grown up nearly to my knees
I remember kneeling in the grassy bowers
Where I began to pick the sweet yellow flowers
Braiding them carefully into flower chains there
To wear like a crown in my loosely blowing hair
Those were the carefree, near forgotten childhood days 
When the whole word was magical in many ways
And a field of wild weeds made me just as happy
As a field of beautiful flowers could make me
Where every seed was a thousand wishes that fly
Just waiting to be whispered to the deep blue sky