The strange story of Rethymno the Thistle
Jan 29, 20:30 | Stories
This is the strange story of Rethymno the Thistle.
Now Rethymno the Thistle – we’ll call him R-Thistle – lived with his mother and father and aunts and uncles and thousands of brothers and sisters and every kind of cousin you can imagine – in the rocky and sandy hedgerows of the island of Crete, very close to the city of Rethymno, which is almost as hard to pronounce as it is to spell.
R-Thistle was a middle thistle –he wasn’t as big as Poppa Thistle, or as small as his 23rd cousin Fizzle Thistle. In fact, R-Thistle was just your ordinary, everyday, common-or-garden, prickly thistle. Except, he didn’t think he was ordinary. Oh sure, he waved in the wind like every other thistle, and the bees buzzed around his purple, cone-shaped flower, and little ants would tickle his stalk until he fell over laughing.
The trouble was, R-Thistle did something all his sisters and brothers and cousins didn’t. He was a thinking thistle. “What am I doing in this hedgerow with all my sisters and brothers and cousins? Why am I not in the hedge over there with those bright red poppies and those olive trees? Is there anywhere else that I could go? What would it be like to grow on top of that big hill with the strange-looking rocks? What’s the other side of that hill?” He decided that he would ask Poppa Thistle, even if it sounded ridiculous. “Poppa Thistle, could I go and grow somewhere else?”
Poppa Thistle laughed so hard he split his crown in two. “R-Thistle,” he chortled, “you’re little! You have many more days to enjoy basking in the sun. You have the cool of the evening and soft slumber at night. You have visits from the bees, and prickles to keep every nasty thing away. Look at me,” he said proudly. “I’m over a hundred days old. See how big and strong I’ve grown! Thousands of offspring like you, R-Thistle, call me Daddy! And I attract the very best bees. At the end of the season, I’ll be harvested to become Poppa Thistle honey! This is the life R-Thistle, in our very own hedgerow.”
“But there’s got to be more than standing in one place in this hedgerow, hasn’t there?” R-Thistle stammered. “I want to explore the world.” Poppa Thistle simply shook his split crown and turned away to face the sun. R-Thistle though he would ask the bees. They were always flying around and obviously they went places. The next time a bee landed on his flower, R-Thistle quickly asked – he had to be quick because bees never stay long – “Bee, where do you come from?”
The bee was so surprised that she almost choked on her cache of pollen. “R-Thistle, don’t you know it’s dangerous to interrupt a bee when she’s working? You can’t talk, buzz and gather pollen at the same time, you know!”
“Sorry,” R-Thistle said quietly, “but I just wondered what it was like on the other side of that hill?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t want to know,” the bee replied. “Why, over the top of the hill it’s all blue – everywhere blue. The sky is blue, naturally, but under the sky is a different blue, and it rolls over and over, and sways from side to side – and when there are clouds it changes color to green and grey. Oh no, you wouldn’t want to go there.”“But why?” R-Thistle asked.
“We don’t talk about it,” the bee replied, and buzzed off to visit one of the bright red poppies near the olive trees.
“Now who am I going to ask?” R-Thistle thought to himself. Just then, a tiny sparrow landed on his cousin twice removed, Spittle Thistle—everyone called him Spittle because of the white foam on his purple cone. “Hey sparrow,” R-Thistle called out. Stunned, the sparrow turned round to see who had called. When every thistle looks alike, how do you know? “Over here,” yelled R-Thistle, shaking his cone. “I want to ask you a question.”
“Never had a thistle ask me a question before,” said the sparrow quizzically, flying over and landing on R-Thistle’s leaves. “Ouch, I wish your leaves weren’t so pointed. I may have to see my gyropractor again.”
“What’s a gyropractor?”
“You are an ignorant thistle. A gyropractor fixes wings. I see my gyropractor at least once a week. Flying isn’t all light and airy and let the wind do it for you, you know. You have to work at it.”
Feeling just a little put down—he didn’t think he was that ignorant—R-Thistle didn’t like to ask again.
“Well come on, what do you want?” the sparrow chirped. “I haven’t got all day. I’ve got errands to do and the kids’ll be furious if I don’t bring home a few tasty morsels.” The sparrow lunged and picked off a fat ant from R-Thistle’s stalk. “Um, that was good. I’m in a good mood now so ask your question.”
“You fly everywhere,” said R-Thistle. “What’s on the other side of that hill?”
“You don’t want to know,” replied the sparrow. “My grandmother told us we should never go and look. My mummy”—and the tears started to dribble down the sparrow’s beak—“flew there one day and never came back. Grandma said that the wind was so strong, it could blow me all the way to Africa; or dash me against the cliffs; or one of those huge Cretan seagulls might snap me up for supper. Oh no. We don’t go there.”
“But didn’t you ever get curious?” asked R-Thistle.
“I took a peek once,” the sparrow admitted. “Under the sky it was blue, or was it green or gray, and it swayed back and forth and was very strange. It was a moving sky. I was going to take a close look when grandma grabbed my tail feathers and pulled me back. She said that mummy had gone to look at the under-the-sky blue and that was the last anyone had seen of her.” The tears started to pour down the sparrow’s cheeks again.“I’m so sorry,” said R-Thistle.
“That’s all right,” the sparrow replied. The sparrow’s head suddenly shot up and she turned round. “Someone’s coming—one of those giants. They are so slow and step on everything… but they also leave lots of treats for dessert. Oh I love those giants.”
The sparrow darted off, leaving R-Thistle to ruminate on what he’d heard. “What was this under-the-sky blue?” The giants he’d seen before. Most of them just thumped on past. They oohed and aahed about some big rocks and columns on the hillside, but didn’t do much else. Little did R-Thistle know, but today was going to be his lucky break. One of the giants stopped by R-Thistle and all his sisters and brothers and cousins. It was a woman with a big hat and a bright, yellow blouse. In her arms she was carrying a bundle of flowers. The flowers were all talking together complaining about being picked.
“You’re not going to pick a thistle,” R-Thistle heard a voice say. “They’re so prickly!”
The flowers all agreed – “No, we don’t want a thistle joining us.”
“I don’t mind,” the woman said to her companion. “They have such a lovely purple center. I’ll be careful,” and she turned her attention to the large patch of thistles. R-Thistle suddenly realized that here was the opportunity he was waiting for. If only the woman would pick him.
“Take me! Take me!” he cried as loud as he could, but what human could be sensitive enough to hear one single thistle. “Over here! Over here!” R-Thistle cried again, but to no avail. In fact, the woman was moving towards some of his distant cousins. “What can I do?” he thought to himself. An ant tickled him and he began to shake. “Not now, ant,” he cried, but the ant began tickling him even more strongly; then a whole number of ants began tickling and soon R-Thistle was waving like a flag in the wind.
“Well if you must have a thistle,” said the woman’s companion, pointing to R-Thistle, “why not take that one? It looks as if it’s waving to you.”
“Yes, it is rather sweet, isn’t it,” the woman replied. Taking a carefully gloved hand she gripped R-Thistle by the stalk and with a small clipper, snipped him free.
“Ouch,” yelled R-Thistle. “That hurt you know.” He hadn’t expected it to be that painful. He looked for the ants but they had all vanished. As soon as they had seen the clippers they had jumped onto R-Thistle’s cousins.
The woman took R-Thistle and carefully cut off some of his lower leaves. “There,” she said when finished, “there won’t be as many prickles now.” She then took R-Thistle and put him in with the bunch of other flowers, next to one of the red poppies he had always wanted to meet.
“Oh no,” the red poppy exclaimed. “We have a thistle with us; a big, prickly, ugly purple thistle.
R-Thistle was surprised and hurt. “I’m a beautiful thistle,” he cried. “I’m just as attractive as you are with your bright red flower. I always wanted to meet you. I’ve been watching you from the thistle patch for ages.”
It was the red poppy’s turn to be embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My parents always told us kids not to mix with different species.”
“Why ever not?” R-Thistle asked.
“They didn’t think the relationship would last,” the red poppy replied.
“Oh,” said R-Thistle. He didn’t know what to say and decided to keep quiet for a while.
The woman picked some other flowers to add to the bunch and she soon had a bright variety. These new flowers were terribly upset to find a thistle in the middle of the bunch. “How awful!” one said. “How embarrassing!” said another. “What lack of class!” cried a third.
There was silence for several minutes before R-Thistle ventured to ask the question that was foremost on his mind. “Where is she taking us?” he asked quietly.
“I heard her telling her friend that she would be taking us back to Santorini to dry us,” said the red poppy.
“Dry us!” R-Thistle exclaimed. “What does that mean?”
“I’m told that you live forever,” the red poppy answered.
“Wow – really?” R-Thistle couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d been told by Poppa Thistle that come fall, R-Thistle himself would fade away with his family including his mother and father, and all his brothers and sisters and cousins. He would never be remembered. It would just get colder and colder and the sun would shine less every day, and then his stalk would fold over and he would disappear for ever. “How do you know that?” he had asked Poppa Thistle and Poppa Thistle had looked at R-Thistle and thought him the most curious thistle he had ever seen. Poppa Thistle said that he had been told this tale by the big, evergreen tree on the ridge. “We fade away and then come back again in the spring—but you won’t remember.”
But R-Thistle wanted to remember, badly. “I’m going to live,” he thought to himself as he settled into the bunch of flowers around him. He was so comfortable, he went to sleep. He didn’t remember the ride in the car. He didn’t remember the fast ship. And he didn’t remember the twisty turny bus ride up the steep cliffs from the port at Santorini. He only woke up when he realized that he was hanging upside down, tied in a bundle with the other flowers and below him was a huge open space, and below that was the under-the-sky blue that the little sparrow had told him about. And he could tell that it moved, swaying to and fro, with little bits of white here and there. But what was that moving under-the-sky blue?
“I wonder if I could get closer to it,” he thought. He began to twist and shake.
The red poppy yelled at him. “Stop it, you stupid thistle!”
“I want to see the under-the-sky blue,” R-Thistle retorted, now pushing back and forth, trying to free himself from the tightly tied bundle. Suddenly, and much to his surprise, R-Thistle was free of the bundle and floating in the air—along with all the other flowers.
“What have you done?” cried the red poppy, floating beside him.
“We’re off to see the under-the-sky blue,” R-Thistle shouted back happily.
“But I don’t want to see it,” the red poppy replied. “I want to live forever.”
“It’s too late,” R-Thistle replied. It sure was a gentle fall. He spun with the wind, he floated like the gulls, and the under-the-sky blue came closer and closer. “It looks so peaceful down there,” he thought.
Down, down and down he floated, twirling softly for hundreds of feet. If you’ve ever been to Santorini, you know just how high the cliffs are and what a long way down it is to the sea. Finally, at long last, R-Thistle landed on the under-the-sky blue. All the other flowers were floating near him on the water. It was oh so wonderfully soft and cooling. It reminded him of swaying in the wind back in the thistle patch with all his family and friends.
And then he realized that he could never see his family and friends again. Now that he wasn’t attached to his stalk, he wouldn’t last over a hundred days like Poppa Thistle, or even fifty-seven like Fizzle Thistle. And he began to cry purple tears down from his purple cone, and they spread into the under-the-sky blue which turned purple around him.
“Oh that’s beautiful,” said a voice he’d never heard before. A big white gull with a yellow beak and sharp eyes was looking down at him. “What are you doing here little thistle?” the gull asked.
“I wanted to see the big, under-the-sky blue,” R-Thistle stammered.
“The under-the-sky blue – oh you mean the sea. Ha ha ha! Under-the-sky blue! That’s a good one. So little thistle, where do you come? I like your cone—great color.”
“I’m from Crete. My family lives in a big thistle patch outside Rethymno. I wanted to go on an adventure and see the under-the-sky blue. Now I just want to go home.”
“Home eh? That’s a tall order. Santorini’s a long way from Crete—but I got a few cousins there. They dive bomb tourists at the old fort in Rethymno and they’ve offered to train me to crap on cruise ships. Yeah – I’ve been looking for an excuse to get away from the flock for a few days.”
“You mean, you’ll take me home?” R-Thistle asked hopefully.
“Why not? Give me a few minutes to say my goodbyes and we’re off.”
As good as his word, the gull flew R-Thistle all the way back over the sea to Crete, across the shoreline, over the big hill, over the red poppies and back to the thistle patch. Poppa Thistle and all R-Thistle’s family and friends waved frantically in their excitement. “That’s some reception, kid,” said the seagull, as he hovered in the air before dropping R-Thistle into the middle of the thistle patch.
“Thank you very much,” R-Thistle cried.
“You’re welcome, son,” squawked the gull, who was even now flying off to his own rendezvous with destiny. “Have a great life.”
R-Thistle sank down into the comfort of the thistle patch, encircled by family and friends. Whether he became reattached to his stalk this tale does not tell. But if you’re around a thistle patch and listen very carefully, you may just hear a bee buzzing by and say, “You see that thistle over there—the biggest one of all? Well that’s R-Thistle. He’s the wild one who took off for Santorini. And his friend seagull is a huge hit on cruise ships. They’re our heroes!”