He’d asked her before. In fact, over and over again. ‘Would she marry him?’ Her answer was always the same. But that didn’t dissuade him at all. He would ask again. He was, after all, nothing if not persistent.
Unlike the weather that afternoon that had not yet decided what it wanted to do – pouring down rain just over there where a stranger shuddered beneath the sudden onslaught, and he over here with sunshine on his shoulder and a rainbow in the sky above connecting the two – his decision, with regards her, had long since been made.
Like that grey-dark cloud that would be moved along away from him in short order by the gusting wind that had ushered it to hover momentarily over the poor fellow seeking shelter beneath a tree where the rain was unleashed in brief furry, he too moved along among the sunlit leaves assured of her answer.
He was off trail, just wandering, the leaves scuffed by his feet into the air where they were caught and spun about by sporadic flurries into swirling, whirling mini tornadoes.
That’s how he happened to see them.
They’d been hiding.
Smaller than a quarter, two of the tiniest daisies he’d ever had occasions to observe peered up at him from where they huddled together for warmth against the crisp autumn chill.
As if they knew what he knew; as if they were then at that moment like he and she would be; as if they expected the same answer he always hoped to hear whenever he asked her that question which was often, these little daisies seemed to smile a knowing smile at him.
He smiled back at his little friends he had unexpectedly happened upon and considered again her always expected answer to his oft repeated and all-important question: ‘Would she marry him?’
She always said yes.
But he kept asking anyway.
Because, though expected, he just always liked to hear her answer.
