I first need to call the reader’s attention to something in last week’s column, “Cow Pastures, Comets, and Car Sales.” The number “48” at the end of the second paragraph did not mean the year “1948.” In my numbering of the words to make sure I don’t go over, each paragraph has its number of words at the end. I erase those numbers before sending in my piece, but slipped up, leaving that number. A very diligent, well-meaning staff member, thinking I meant the year, changed it to that.

Now, to this week: I’ve lately noticed a great procession of tiny pieces of “fluff” going by outside the sliding glass door of my living room. This fluff doesn’t mean “something of little consequence,” but instead, a means of seed dispersal for some plants (since they can’t sow them in rows, they have to “come up with” another way).

Limiting my vision solely to the scene through the glass door, I was reminded of an old Vaudeville rotating scenery backdrop because of the “seeming” repetitiveness of the fluff streaming by. A similar comparison (though as faulty as the first) would be with a snow globe: the same “flakes” getting shaken up over and over.

This constant, though delicate “barrage” almost makes me think I live “downstream” (airstream) from a whole new continent consisting of wildflower meadow lands, giving Fall-time birth to these downy-carried seeds.

As a child on the Old Concord Road, I enjoyed watching World War II movies on television (that war, almost only one generation away then). When the paratroopers drifted down, I would say: “Someone blew a dandelion!”

I haven’t seen any of the large milkweed puffballs yet. They have a hot-air-balloon and zeppelin stateliness compared to their smaller “cousins” which seem to be racing, sometimes nervously toward their destination.

Visually singling out “fluff-flakes” in this “storm” is easier than following individual snowflakes in theirs, although I got pretty good at that as a child.

While driving the other day, I turned down one street resembling an urban “artery” of these little white “corpuscles.” Meeting them straight-on, their backlighting by the evening sun made them resemble “spidery” silhouettes.

And talking spiders, I saw some of that fluff snared in a spider web on my porch. Looking closely, I saw a tiny seed still attached. Good luck to the spider thinking to wrap it up for a rainy day meal, for he would have a tough “nut” to crack. This steady, “flaky” wind makes me imagine snowfall which never accumulates, only floats. Wispy cirrus clouds dominate the sky and seem to have more in common with this “downyness” than with what they are known to precipitate.

I saw some of this fluff float by outside my physical rehab center. The room there is bright, window-filled; and while “working out,” I look through the windows of the third floor. “Something” went by, and I realized it was the faint reflection of a therapist walking by behind me. But the very next “flyby” was an outside puffball, way above city streets.

Fungus “puffballs” grew in the shaded backyard of my boyhood home on the Old Concord Road. Stepped on, they “exhaled” a “breath” of bad-smelling black spores. For me, they have an “air” of nostalgia now, but at the time, they were very nasty!

Entering my car, a puffball floated in with me; but unlike like an intruding wasp, its flight path was stinger-less.

Seeds which “float” make us take notice, just like our long-term wonder at birds in flight.

Scientists speak of parallel universes where things might happen just a little “differently.” Leonardo DaVinci’s drawing of his “flying machine” was based on bat wings, and he studied birds too.

Now consider a parallel universe, a long time ago (or now, or in the future) and far, far away. In that place, students open history books to see THEIR DaVinci’s flying-machine plans, inspired by neither bat nor bird, but instead, based upon something which took flight long before them: a lightweight, gossamer-like, seed-carrying puffball.