The Lady Of The Daisies

She loves me, she loves me not ...

The Lady Of The Daisies

It was summer, many decades ago, and I was travelling with a stranger who had hitched a ride with me along the highway of my life several weeks previously, somewhere just outside some small, dusty town in Arizona.

As we drove north and east from the desert states, the air cooled and the landscape took on a greener hue. Along the way, she would sit cross-legged in the passenger seat of my van, and the scent of patchouli would drift from her hair. In between unfinished conversations, she would sing along to a cassette of Neil Young or The Stones. By the time we reached the mountains of Colorado, I was madly in love.

One quiet morning, she held a daisy that she had picked from the roadside at the last station where we stopped for gasoline and snacks wrapped in crinkled plastic. I watched as she plucked one petal after another from the flower.

"She loves me," she would say with a giggle as she released a petal into the passing air. Then, just as quickly, she would snatch another, and in a sterner voice, say, "She loves me not."

That moment has stayed with me through all my life. Something, something about the way she looked into my eyes as she recited that childhood cadence caught the fire of my imagination. Many years later, I would write a short story based on the incident, but the context of the story was far different from the original experience. I've never been sure why.

It was during our travels that I learned how true love knows no rhyme or reason, has no rules, no expectations, no handbook, no map that tells you the route from first kiss to everlasting bliss.

If anything, the intensity of my love for her seemed to have tossed me into a state of helplessness.

I discovered that love is definitely not something that you can pin down or measure or keep pressed in the back pages of the latest best seller. I learned that, in one breathless moment, love seems to arrive so easily and so simply at the doorway to your heart, but in another equally breathless moment, love may just as easily and just as simply disappear down the stairway that descends from all your hopes and dreams, and leave you in a spiral of loneliness.

Thinking back, I remember parting ways with the lady of the daisies somewhere south of the black hills of Dakota. She left, almost nonchalantly, after coffee one morning to hitch a ride east to see "the freaks," as she said to me with a bright smile, in some commune hidden somewhere in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York.

When she left, I don't remember being shocked or dismayed. Nothing seemed permanent in those times, and while I'm sure my heart stalled as I watched her walk away, I must confess, it was far from broken. We never spoke of a future together, and we never confused happiness with permanence. One moment she loved me; the next moment she did not. Simple.

That day, as I headed north to Canada, I missed her for an hour or so, maybe more. It was only later that I found the scribbled note she had left under a pile of cassettes, and then I knew that she had been with me for a reason and that she had left me for an even better reason.