Liv Little

Wat up boo, thinkin' of you

    Olivia was still in preschool, daycare actually, at the time. In the four years prior, on our way to and from school each day we would drive past a peculiarly located empty field. It was in a relatively rural area of a fairly well off Connecticut town, and across a busy street from a few cookie cutter colonials. I like to refer to this empty piece of land as a field, but in reality it was just a small parcel that had inexplicably never been developed. I guess this is what gave it that peculiarity. It wasn’t a very attractive piece of land, but with thinned out forest surrounding the three sides that weren’t meeting the road, it was a nice break in our commute which was otherwise full of parking lots and mailboxes.

    What really gave this piece of land an identity though was the transformation it goes through for two weeks of every year. Each spring, the field would bloom with wild daffodils of white and yellow. So for those two weeks, the daffodils became the focal point of our drives. Our conversations always seemed to be followed by Olivia asking if we could stop to pick some flowers. Located on a sharp and hidden bend of this very busy road, the time never seemed quite right - or safe - to make the stop. There actually was no place to park, so when I say park the car, what I mean is drive over a curb and blaze my own parking in some unkempt shrubbery. Across the street from this field, though, and in front of one of the few houses, there was an old abandoned looking garage, similar in appearance to an old mine entrance, behind a small patch of overgrown grass that was about the same size as my little Subaru.    

    By this time, as a parent, I had enough experience to realize that the only answer I could give Olivia each time she asked to stop and pick the flowers was “someday.” Never “tomorrow,” or “next week,” or “this afternoon.” Always “someday.” And not because I didn’t want to promise her the moment in the field, but because I knew that the broken promise of “tomorrow” was harder for me to stomach than having to wait another year for the perfect day. It had to be a sunny day, I thought, preferably a Friday when we could be a bit lax with her bedtime. Keeping hurry out of the equation was important; the last thing I wanted was to rush her through this moment she had imagined for years. In reality, countless “perfect days” had come and gone, I just didn’t take advantage when they were there. 

    But one morning was different. I couldn’t handle the idea of waiting another year for that perfect day to come. This was now her last spring before beginning kindergarten. With the elementary school located in a different area of town, this meant our drives would no longer take us past what we knew as our field. Sure we would still periodically take ourselves down that road, but the field that had been such a big part of our lives would likely soon become a part of our lives that we would talk about in the past tense. 

    The daffodils had already been in bloom for a couple weeks, many were beginning to shed their pedals and wilt. Guilt quickly took over, and I couldn’t believe how I let Olivia’s perfect day be put off for as long as I had. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a little five year old girl who cared more about playing in a field of wild daffodils with her dad than she did about contriving a moment that would be remembered as perfect. She wasn’t lost in what I saw as ideal, and that was perfect. 

    Finally, on this drizzling Tuesday afternoon, we suddenly found ourselves alone on the road, no busy cars riding close behind, and before we had time to realize what was happening, we were parked up over the curb and in front of that old stone garage. We carefully got out of the car; I squeezed her through the narrowly opened door on the passenger side, away from the road, picked her up, and with her gripping my shoulders tightly, ran across the street. We decided that only a handful of flowers would be picked, as to leave the field mostly untouched for others to enjoy. We spent our time running across the field, looking only for the best of them to take home with us. It was cloudy, rainy, cold, our feet were soaked, there were spiders hiding under pedals, and it could not have been better in any way. That day was put on hold for years, waiting for perfectly aligned opportunity, and yet it was found on the most imperfect of days. I was able to snap a few pictures of Olivia playing in our field of daffodils; one stood out over the rest. There are no flowers in sight, and the only sign of the day comes by way of a single raindrop sitting at the tip of Olivia’s nose.