Dozing daisies brushing up against my skirt, I am transported back to my Dad stepping up on the backporch, worn farmer’s hands carrying a five gallon pail cascading with delicate yellow faces rimmed in white veils. “Think she’ll like them?” he shyly asks.
I can’t help but smile, thinking of that tattered blue wedding album with its faded photos of Mama in a gown of pearls and lace, slender fingers holding a bouquet of daisies.
I nod. “She will. And she’ll remember.” His smile gives way to soft laughter and memories that are only theirs.
A light breeze rouses the daisies, and I am the bride in white with my own trembling hands clutching white posies. With open Bible and earnest eyes, the preacher man’s bariotone English accent fills the chapel, “Today is Ann’s wedding day. And so I am reminded of John Denver who once wrote a song for his wife named Annie’s Song.”
How did the preacher know? I catch my father’s eyes. Tears are spilling down his leathery cheeks, Mama gently leaning into his shoulder. A long ago night Dad had brought home those very notes and Mama had caressed the piano so that the house danced with that kind of intoxicated love. Several times a week during my childhood the house would fill, then rise, inflated with the passion of Annie’s Song.
“Yes, this preacher knows those lyrics: You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest. Like a mountain in springtime. Like a walk in the rain.” Through a blur of emotion, my eyes embrace Dad and Mama in the second pew, and together our tears share the remaining refrain, “Like a storm in the desert, like a sleepy blue ocean. You fill up my senses, Come fill me again.”
The preacher pauses, then asks, “Isn’t it sad that he later divorced that woman he loved so much?
Isn’t it sad that the great flute player James Galway was so entranced by that John Denver song that he recorded an entire record of songs and called it ‘Songs for Annie.’ He played those songs as only that Irish flute player can play.
And then he divorced his wife.”
Daisies now fill my arms like a sheaf of summer glory, and I head up the back lane carrying that one line with me too. “And then he divorced his wife.”
Today is the thirteenth anniversary of our marriage covenant; I am picking buckets of my mama’s wedding flower, just as my father once did for her on their anniversary.
And then he too divorced his wife.
A pailful of wild daisies and passion will not be enough.
In the mudroom sink, I fill the tin bucket with water and arrange the sunny faces. Perhaps the wooden candlesticks that witnessed our becoming one could come join the daisies on the dining room table, too? Then to lay out the strawberry pie, the same recipe his mother made for our reception guests, the recipe I make for each annual celebration of our sacred vows, regardless of new babies, illnesses, preganancies, or the whirl of it all. Love simply must be done.
For that is what the greatest thing of all is: a verb, an act of the will, a choice of the heart.
Like deliberately purposing to daydream about him when apart, so we might be closer, the dream reality, when we are together.
Like falling into love routines: steaming bowl of breakfast goodness ready at his place, smile and kiss waiting for his return, bed covers turned back at day’s end.
Simple, preservative acts: massaging the knots out of his shoulders while he reads the paper, leaving thank-you notes on his pillow, smiling and laughing more, because he works so hard to bring happiness.
Passion must mature beyond words to deeds: quiet, daily, self-sacrificing effort. Richer than merely a feeling, love is, in its fullness, something that one does.
I snip off a few daisy blooms to grace the pie and hear again the echo of those two radical words that reverberated off the chapel walls thirteen years ago:
I do.
