They would trash any poppy that didn’t look presentable outside. The small villagers would take their paper poppies and tape them to their concrete yards all around their cottages. As you could image, taping paper poppies to concrete may look good for a moment but as soon as a wind comes they are knocked over. The people would spend just as much time mending and re-taping their poppies as they did in making them in the first place and they would never, ever think of giving their paper poppies away.
Poppy was just like his fellow villagers in that he wanted to make paper poppy flowers, but whenever he had crafted, at least in his opinion, a very fine looking flower, he didn’t know what to do with it. You see, all around Poppy’s cottage was dirty dirt instead of clean concrete like his neighbors.
Poppy would try and tape his paper flower to the dirt but it never worked; he ended up with a dirty dirt yard full of flowers that wouldn’t stand up. Poppy’s neighbors didn’t know what to say to Poppy, they just focused on their yards of paper flowers and hoped Poppy would figure it out soon and have a yard like them.
One night when all of the small people in their small cottages in the small village in the small, far off country where tucked into their small beds, a man came walking down the road throwing something all over the small village. When the villagers awoke the next morning and went outside to see their paper flowers, they found that there were small black objects all over their yards.
“What in the world are these?” some said.
“Do we eat them? Do we throw them away?” others asked.
Some of the villagers looked suspiciously at the small items and said,“They are making our paper poppies droop,” and they quickly went around and brushed off their paper flowers. Soon, the whole village began to do the same. The last thing they wanted was for their hard work making those flowers to go to naught.
Poppy stood on his door step listening to his neighbors’ conversations but was puzzled. When he looked out at his dirty dirt yard, he didn’t see any of the small black objects. Poppy didn’t think much more about it – he figured that it was just another one of those things that he didn’t get to do because of his dirty dirt yard – and he went back inside to work on his paper poppies.
As Poppy sat peering over a pastel purple paper poppy, he began to find a small tickle in his mind that making the paper poppy just wasn’t scratching. His curiosity about the small black objects grew until it occupied every thought. Poppy finally walked back outside and looked around at his neighbors’ clean concrete yards and didn’t see a single one of the small black objects. He went into his dirty dirt yard and found that the small black objects were in his yard and they were beginning to sink into his dirty dirt. Poppy bent down and was about to start throwing them out of his yard when he stopped for no reason he could put his finger on. Poppy decided to let the objects stay in his yard.
Over the next weeks, Poppy started to notice a change in his dirty dirt yard. While his neighbors’ clean concrete yards remained the same with the exception of whenever the wind knocked over the paper poppies, Poppy’s yard was changing color. Out of the dirty dirt, small green poles were coming up. Neither Poppy nor his neighbors had ever seen anything like it before. Soon, Poppy noticed that the poles had leaves growing out of their sides and soon were producing copies of the paper poppies that they village made, except these “copies” made the paper poppies look like the copies while these new creations were the reality the villagers had been trying to reproduce all along. After a short time, standing above the brown dirty dirt of Poppy’s old yard, were waves of red-petal poppies more vibrant than anything any villager had ever produced from paper.
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