The Tale of Johnny Milkweed
Wherever Johnny Milkweed roamed, the wind seemed to know his step. He carried no sack of gold or sword of iron—only pods bursting with silken seeds. When he walked through a town, folks would find milkweed sprouting in the cracks of fences and along the edges of gravel drives, like green echoes of his passing.
They say he followed the monarchs south one season and north the next, sleeping under the same stars that guided their wings. Children would see him scatter a handful of fluff and swear the air itself shimmered. Old-timers muttered that the man wasn’t planting so much as listening—that milkweed simply rose up where his boots touched the earth.
And when he vanished down a dusty road at dusk, the seeds kept floating, taking root wherever the wind laid them—proof that Johnny Milkweed had passed through, leaving the land just a little wilder, a little freer, and humming with life.
