Daisy Memoir

it's not my memoir, but it made my creative juices flow, flow, flowing.



Daisy Memoir

She came home with a daisy yesterday, crushed; it sat wilted and flattened beneath her weekly newsletter and her reading log that I’d forgotten to sign the previous night. The wet imprints of a once much alive flower remained on both the weekly newsletter and the reading log; it was weeping.

“I bringed you a flower.” She’d exclaimed excitedly and ditched her peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the stool and bounced over to her oversized aquamarine nap sack to look for it. I opened my mouth to tell her it was ‘brought’ not ‘bringed,’ but was interrupted when she found what was left of the daisy.

She held the flower up, and waved it around, the sad crushed petals void of all moisture, and the color faded to a light brown. She asked if we could put it up on the fridge, and pouted when I told her it probably wouldn’t stay.

After a long ten minutes of watching her pout, I sighed, and decided it’d be best to compromise with her; in smaller words of course. I suggested that we tape the flower on the wall, on top of the fireplace mantel above the pictures. She smiled; she must have gone to great lengths to pick this daisy.

“Martha’s going to teach me to make a daisy crown so I can be the princess of the meadows.” She’d announced as I rummaged through the drawers looking for scotch tape. I had inquired on why she wanted to be the princess and not the queen.

She looked at me as I was from Mars.

I followed up by asking the problem with being a queen. The look finally washed off her face as she explained to me word by word that queens were old, and already married, and she hadn’t met her prince charming yet.

The mind of a child is much more complex than that of an adult. Children expect you to know everything.

Afterwards, I sent her to wash up and take a bath before dinner because we had guests tonight. She quietly obeyed, but not without saying goodbye to her flower first.

In the middle of a rerun of ’Bones’ while chopping tomatoes, I was interrupted by a shrill scream for my name.

“MOMMY!” The little voice came for the bathroom down the hall. Brushing away the annoyance that suddenly rushed over me, I wiped my hands dry and jogged down the hallway to the bathroom where she was still screaming ‘mommy.’

“Yes?” I’d asked, peering through a small crack in the door.

“The towels are all wet.” She complained standing naked with her arms wrapped around her small frail body. I quickly shed my apron and handed it to her as a makeshift towel.

“What happened to all the towels?” I asked, and she deliberately pointed into the bathtub. Over the layer of steaming bubbly water sat all the colorful towels that some distant uncle had gotten the family last Christmas.

“Princess, why are all the towels in the bathtub?” I eyed her, and walked over to grab a clean, dry one from the closet.

“I dropped mine in,” she stopped and pointed to ‘The Little Mermaid,’ towel floating on the surface. “And it looked real pretty, and it floated! So then I put the others in and it all looked real pretty, but I couldn’t see it, so I stood on top of the toilet, then I got cold, but I saw that I had no more towels left!” She shrugged as I wrapped a fluffy blue towel around her, it coated her whole body from her shoulders to her toes and the bottom was swishing against the tile floor.

I sent her to get dressed, and gathered all the towels from the bathtub into a laundry hamper. I’d already forgiven her because I knew by now that children almost never mean to be malicious.

When I was returning from the laundry room, I passed by the front door and saw a small family of four huddled on the doorstep. A man and a woman and two children. The kids each held small red boxes with pink ribbon while the man was gripping a wrapped bottle of what I presumed to be wine or champagne.

The guests.

I quickly ran my hand through my hair and speed walked to the door. Surprised that I wasn’t behind the door, the family was silent for a moment before they began to loosen up.

As soon as I had invited them inside and seated them in the living room with some kind of English tea, I went about the house to find my daughter. I found her quickly enough; she sat in front of the fireplace mantel, admiring her daisy again.

“Baby, we have guests.” I whispered and she glanced over her shoulder at me.

“I was talking to my flower.” She said, and pushed herself to her feet. “It told me that it wanted to look more like a daisy again.”

When she walked through the living room, everyone awed and tugged at her braids, and asked her to twirl so they could see her dress. She stood there flattered, but always looked back towards her lonely flower a few feet away.

Then she saw it. The hat shaped like a monkey. The pom-poms dangling cheerfully off the edges and the ears perking out on top of the person’s head.

“Why are you wearing a hat?” She asked, tugging at the pom-pom’s dangling from the side of the young boy’s accessory.

“It’s my sisters.” He blushed. “I’m sick.”

“So? When I’m sick, I don’t wear hats.” She raised a thin eyebrow.

Children’s attempts are never malicious.

“Sweetie…” I ushered and moved closer to her.

“Except I’m really sick.”

“Once I was really sick. I was in bed for two whole days and all I ate was chicken soup. Euch!” She stuck out her tongue.

“Sweetie…” I tried again.

“I know what will make you feel better!” She ran towards the fireplace, and I knew just what she was getting. She reappeared seconds later, her dress a little more ruffled and her hair a little more out of place, but in her hands she held her crushed daisy. “Here.”

“I couldn’t.” The boy smiled.

“Yes you could, all you have to do is hold out your hand, and don’t forget to say thank you.”

The boy did as he was told and held out his hand, I imagined that the moment he touched the dead daisy that it would bloom into a bouquet full of white and yellow, but it never happened.

The daisy sat in the palm of his hand as he said ‘thank you’ and it still looked as dead as it was crushed between the reading log and the weekly newsletter.

I could see that Lira was looking really hard. She was squinting, her eyes focusing all the light into one spot, and she could see the life in the daisy begin to take place. I concentrated with her and imagined that I could see the stem begin to emerge and the white petals encircle the yellow center.

When she blinked, she looked disappointed back down at the boy’s hand, and without another word she walked away. Her daisy didn’t come back to life. It would never be the same.

I blinked, and the petals all disappeared, leaving just the dried out flower. The young boy smiled, but he didn’t glow like he used to. His pale skin no longer trapped the light and one day he would be as pale as the daisy’s petals and as equally alive. The boy was still sick; for once I understood how she felt more than ever. He would never be the same.

I looked into her eyes, so alive and innocent; she looked at me and she said, “I’m hungry,” and the daisy was forgotten.