I’m not sure if it was a dandelion. The wispy head was the size of a softball. I’d never seen one so large before. There were, in fact, three growing on the side of the hill. I saw them as I raced to the train station. Running late, I couldn’t photograph them at the time. A few hours later, heading home, I saw that there was only this one remaining. The others had blown away.
This one’s placement on the hill was too high, and the plants around it too thorny, for me to get too close. I zoomed in as best I could but I could not brush away the grasses growing in front of it. Later, I considered deleting the image — it was not what I had expected — but something stayed my hand long enough to see the beauty of what I had captured, and which existed no more except in memory.
