The other day, while wandering near our Hogum Creek cabin, I found at the spot where, two years ago, my wife broadcast a handful of domesticated flower seeds, a single daisy exploding loudly white against the lightly swaying Timothy. The single blossom was held high as a plate stiff-armed above a crowd by a waiter passing through a bustling room. I felt convinced, at the time my wife threw the seeds to the open elements, that none of the sissified flower-box exotics would survive the uncertain summers and harsh mountain winters there at the feet of the Continental Divide. I believe I told my wife something about having better luck broadcasting the seeds across the highway to Lincoln. “Try that,” I think I pronounced with appropriate finality.
“Something will grow,” she assured me with certainty as she pitched a mist of seeds.
My wife nearly always proved correct.
I said to the daisy when I found it, “Hello, Uyen,” and I stood with the flower for quite a while, allowing the shadows of clouds to drag right overtop me after watching them rove down though the open parks and forests above the narrow mountain valley. The air smelled of some sweet flower or tree I could not name and I could hear the creek murmuring along the overhang banks in the meadow beyond. The daisy blazed white against the tame green of tall grass. Standing there, I needed to admit to myself that being wrong about that flower surviving felt better than being correct about anything I could readily remember.
--Mitchell Hegman
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