Fluffy Butt and the Dandelions
In all of Buttercup Hollow, there was no tail like Fluffy Butt’s.
Everyone agreed on this. The rabbits agreed. The field mice agreed. The hedgehogs, who were not easily impressed by anything, agreed. Even old Grandfather Bramble, the eldest and grumpiest rabbit in the whole meadow, who had not agreed with anybody about anything since the spring of the great flood, would squint at it sometimes as she hopped past and grumble, “Hmph. That is a very fluffy tail.”
It was enormous. It was round. It was so white and so soft and so thick that it looked less like a tail and more like a small cloud that had wandered down out of the sky and decided to stay. When she hopped, it bounced. When she sat, it puffed out behind her like a dandelion gone to seed. When she sat very still in the sunshine, in the long grass, the butterflies sometimes landed on it, thinking it was a flower.
Her mother had named her Clementine. Nobody had called her that since she was three weeks old.
She did not mind. Fluffy Butt was a perfectly good name. She rather liked it.
She lived with her mother and six brothers and sisters in a cozy burrow beneath a hawthorn hedge at the edge of the meadow, where the grass grew tall and green and full of flowers, and the hills rolled away in soft waves toward a little white farmhouse on the far side. She had brown fur dappled with cream and dark stripes, like a bit of sunlight falling through leaves. She had big dark eyes, and long ears lined with pink, and white whiskers that twitched when she was thinking.
And she was very good at getting into trouble because of her tail.
It got stuck. Constantly. In hedges, in fences, in the narrow parts of the burrow. Once, she had tried to squeeze through a gap in the farmer’s stone wall and gotten wedged there for an entire afternoon, front half in the cabbage patch and back half in the meadow, with her tail sticking out like a cork in a bottle, until her brothers came and pulled her free by the ears. Another time, she sat down in a patch of ripe dandelion clocks, and when she stood up, a hundred dandelion seeds were caught in her fur, and she looked so much like a walking puffball that a confused goldfinch followed her all the way home. And one memorable summer morning, a bumblebee had landed in it, gotten lost, and spent twenty minutes buzzing around in there trying to find the way out, while Fluffy Butt hopped in very small, very anxious circles and her sisters laughed so hard they had to lie down.
But the thing about Fluffy Butt’s tail that mattered most was the humans.
Humans could not resist it. Not one of them.
Whenever a human came walking along the lane at the edge of Buttercup Hollow, whether it was the farmer, or the farmer’s wife, or the boy who delivered the newspaper on his bicycle, or the walkers in their big boots with their maps, they would see Fluffy Butt hopping through the grass. And they would stop. And their faces would go all soft and strange. And they would put their hands to their chests and make the same noise, every single time.
“Awwww.”
And then, every single time, they would crouch down and start tiptoeing toward her, very slowly, with their arms out and their fingers wiggling, whispering things like “Oh, look at that tail, oh, look at that bottom, I just want to pick her up and squeeze her,” in a high, wobbly voice.
Fluffy Butt did not want to be squeezed. She was a rabbit, and rabbits are not for squeezing, as any rabbit will tell you. So every single time, she would wait until they got very close, and then whisk away into the long grass with one great bounce of her fluffy white tail, and the humans would sigh, and stand up, and say, “Oh, she was so FLUFFY,” to each other all the way down the lane.
She did not mean to break their hearts. It was simply the way of things.
But the thing Fluffy Butt loved most in the whole world, more than clover and more than sunshine and more, even, than her tail, was dandelions.
She loved everything about them. She loved the way they opened their bright yellow faces to the sun every morning, like a meadow full of tiny suns. She loved the way they closed up again every evening, as if they were going to sleep. She loved the leaves, which were delicious, and the flowers, which were beautiful, and most of all the fluffy white seed heads, the dandelion clocks, which you could blow on and make a wish.
So every morning, as soon as the dew was on the grass, she would put on her basket and go picking.
The basket had been her grandmother’s. It was a little round wicker basket, woven from willow twigs, with a leather strap that went over her shoulder so she could carry it on her back and keep her paws free. Every morning, she filled it to the brim with dandelions, the yellowest and brightest and sunniest she could find, standing up on her hind legs to reach the tallest ones, very carefully, so as not to bruise them.
And then she gave them all away.
That was the part nobody quite understood. She did not eat them. Well, a few leaves, maybe. But not the flowers. She hopped all through Buttercup Hollow with her basket, and she gave them out, one by one, to whoever needed them most.
She gave three to Grandfather Bramble, whose joints ached in the mornings, and who pretended to be grumpy about it but always put them in a jar by his bed. She gave one to Mrs. Prickles the hedgehog, who had been sad ever since her children grew up and moved to the next field over. She gave two to the field mice twins, who had a cold. She gave one to the old toad by the pond, who was nearly blind and said he could still see yellow. She gave one to a snail, once, simply because it looked like it was having a hard day.
“Why do you do it?” her littlest brother, Thistle, asked her once, watching her tuck a dandelion behind Mrs. Prickles’s door. “You spend all morning picking them, and then you just give them all away. Every single one.”
Fluffy Butt thought about it, her whiskers twitching.
“Because they’re like little pieces of sunshine,” she said at last. “And some people don’t get enough sunshine. So I bring them some.”
Thistle accepted this completely. He was very small.
It was on a bright, dewy morning at the very start of summer, while she was picking dandelions at the top of the hill near the farmhouse, that Fluffy Butt first saw the girl in the window.
She was a small human. Very small, for a human. Seven years old, perhaps, with a tangle of red-gold hair and a freckled nose pressed flat against the glass of an upstairs window of the little white farmhouse. She was sitting propped up in a bed beside the window, under a patchwork quilt, and one of her legs was wrapped in something big and white and stiff that stuck straight out in front of her.
She was watching the meadow. And she looked, Fluffy Butt thought, like the saddest small creature she had ever seen.
Fluffy Butt asked around. That was the thing about Buttercup Hollow: somebody always knew. It was the barn swallows who told her, in the end, chattering on the gutter. The girl’s name was Poppy. She was the farmer’s granddaughter, come to stay for the summer. On her very first day, she had climbed the old apple tree by the barn, and fallen out of it, and broken her leg in two places. Now the doctor said she had to stay in bed for six whole weeks. The whole summer, nearly. While everyone else was out in the sunshine.
She watched the meadow from that window all day long, the swallows said. Every day. The grass and the hills and the flowers. And every day she looked a little bit sadder.
Fluffy Butt looked up at that window for a long time, with her whiskers twitching.
Some people, she thought, don’t get enough sunshine.
Getting to the window was not easy. It was on the second floor. But there was a woodpile against the side of the farmhouse, and a rain barrel next to the woodpile, and a wooden window box full of red geraniums just below the sill. And Fluffy Butt was very determined.
The first morning, she made it up the woodpile and onto the rain barrel and nearly fell into the rain barrel. The second morning, she made it all the way up onto the window box, and her tail got stuck between two geraniums, and she had to wiggle for a very long time. But on the third morning, just as the sun came up, she climbed all the way up, and stood on her hind legs in the window box, and very carefully laid one bright yellow dandelion on the windowsill, right against the glass.
Then she hopped down and hid in the grass to watch.
When Poppy woke up and saw it, her whole face changed. She stared at the dandelion. She pressed her hands against the glass. And then she saw, down in the grass below, a small brown rabbit with a wicker basket on her back, peeking up at her, with the biggest, roundest, fluffiest white tail in the whole entire world.
Poppy’s mouth fell open.
Fluffy Butt could not hear through the glass. But she knew, quite well, what the girl was saying. She could see it on her face.
Awwww.
After that, she came every morning.
One dandelion, every single day, on the windowsill, at sunrise. Sometimes two. Once, on a rainy morning, a whole dandelion clock, perfect and round and white, which she carried up the woodpile in her mouth so carefully that not a single seed blew away. And every morning, Poppy was waiting at the window when she came, with her nose against the glass and her eyes shining.
Poppy started leaving things too. A carrot on the windowsill, when her grandmother opened the window to air the room. A slice of apple. A small pile of clover she had asked her grandfather to pick. And once, a drawing, propped up against the inside of the glass, done in crayon. A brown rabbit with a basket and an enormous, fluffy, completely circular white tail, so big it took up half the page. Underneath, in careful letters, it said: MY FRIEND.
Fluffy Butt looked at that drawing for a long time. Her tail, she thought, was not really quite that big.
But she was secretly very pleased.
Six weeks went by. The summer grew hot and golden. And one morning, in the middle of July, when Fluffy Butt climbed up to the window with her dandelion, the bed was empty.
She stood in the window box for a long moment, looking at the empty patchwork quilt, with her dandelion in her mouth and her ears drooping.
Then she heard a sound below her. A small, careful, shuffling sound in the grass.
She looked down.
Poppy was standing at the bottom of the woodpile. The big white thing was gone from her leg. She was leaning on a little wooden crutch, wobbling slightly, in her nightgown, with her red-gold hair sticking up in every direction. And she was looking up at Fluffy Butt with her whole heart on her face.
“Hi,” she whispered.
Fluffy Butt climbed down the woodpile. Slowly. And she sat in the grass at the bottom, a few feet away from the girl, with her basket on her back, and waited.
This was the moment. She knew it. This was the moment every human always got all soft and wobbly, and crouched down, and came tiptoeing toward her with their arms out and their fingers wiggling, saying I just want to squeeze her.
Poppy did not do that.
She lowered herself down into the grass, very carefully, minding her leg. She sat there in the dew, perfectly still, with her hands folded in her lap. She did not reach out. She did not wiggle her fingers. She did not even move. She simply sat, and looked at Fluffy Butt with shining eyes, and waited, the way she had been waiting at that window every morning for six weeks.
She had learned, Fluffy Butt realized. Somewhere up there in that bed, watching the meadow every day, she had learned how to be patient. How to be gentle. How to let someone come to her.
And so, for the first time in her life, Fluffy Butt did something she had never done before.
She hopped forward. Once. Twice. Right up to the girl’s knee. And then, very deliberately, she climbed up into Poppy’s lap, turned around twice, and sat down.
Poppy did not breathe. She did not move a single muscle. Tears filled up her eyes and spilled over.
Then, very, very slowly, very, very gently, she put her arms around the rabbit. And she squeezed.
Just once. Just a little. Just exactly enough.
It was, she would tell her grandchildren seventy years later, the softest thing she had ever felt in her entire life. Softer than a cloud. Softer than a feather pillow. Softer than anything. Especially the tail.
Fluffy Butt allowed it. She even, in fact, rather liked it.
When it was over, she hopped back out of Poppy’s lap. And she reached into her wicker basket, and pulled out the very last thing in it. Not a yellow dandelion. A dandelion clock. Round and perfect and white, every seed still in place. She set it down in the grass in front of the girl.
Poppy looked at it. Then at the rabbit. Then she understood.
She picked it up. She closed her eyes and made a wish, so quietly that not even Fluffy Butt could hear it. And then she blew.
The seeds flew up off the dandelion clock all at once, a hundred tiny white parachutes, and the morning breeze caught them and carried them out over Buttercup Hollow, spinning and floating and drifting, glittering in the sunlight, over the long grass and the yellow flowers and the green rolling hills, until they were gone.
A few of them, inevitably, landed in Fluffy Butt’s tail.
Poppy laughed out loud. It was the first time she had laughed all summer.
She never told anyone what she had wished for. But for the rest of that summer, every single morning, just after sunrise, if you happened to be walking along the lane at the edge of Buttercup Hollow, you would see two small figures out in the meadow, picking dandelions together in the dew. One was a little girl with red-gold hair and a wicker basket of her own. The other was a brown rabbit with a basket on her back and the fluffiest tail anyone had ever seen.
And if you stopped and watched them for a while, you would see that the rabbit allowed the girl one squeeze a day. Exactly one. Very gentle.
No other human ever got one. Fluffy Butt was very firm about that.
The farmer’s wife watched them from the kitchen window every morning, with her coffee going cold in her hand. And every morning, without fail, she put her hand on her heart, and her face went all soft, and she made the same noise.
“Awwww.”
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