Flowers

Lucy sat down under a tree and looked out at the field of flowers. A great mixture of many colors, dancing in the gentle breeze that drifted by. She wanted to run out among it, to be a part of that mass of color, but she didn't want to disturb it, or trample the flowers into the ground beneath her feet. So she sat from a distance away and watched them silently.

She thought about what made a flower a flower. When she was younger, she had seen her father bring her mother flowers, and she had seen the way they made her smile. She was always so happy to receive them. So Lucy had once gone out into the yard and tried to pick flowers, and while her mother smiled when she gave them to her, the smile hadn't been the same as it was when they were from her father. Her mother had explained to her that she had picked weeds from the gardens, not flowers, and that they weren't the same thing. She hadn't really understood at the time.

As she grew older, she learned to appreciate flowers more. The house was always full of them, but it wasn't until she began spending time away from home that she really started to notice them. Other people's houses didn't smell like hers did. They all smelled different, but none of them had quite the same freshness to them, regardless of how well kept they were, unless they also had flowers in them. They also made houses look more colorful. Less drab. They felt more alive to her.

In high school, the reason that her father always brought flowers to her mother began to make sense. She saw boys doing the same to girls they liked, and that's when they would "go steady." She still wasn't entirely sure what that meant. No boy's had ever come to her to ask that. But there was definitely something about it. She had a better idea of it when she read her mother's books. That was where she had learned a little bit about romance. So she supposed there was something romantic about giving flowers. But that seemed to her much more like a thing in the books than in reality.

As she looked out over the field, she wondered if there were more things about flowers that she still hadn't realized. Things that had perhaps played a role in her life that she wouldn't appreciate until she was older. Maybe one day they would give her strength in moments of weakness, or help guide her along her path to find her future.

She got up from where she had been sitting for quite some time, not fully noticing the passage of time while she looked at the flowers. She walked to its edge, and picked a few of the flowers, pulling out her hair tie to tie them together. She didn't notice the boy who watched the way her hair flowed out and blew in the wind as she did so, or the way his eyes watched her as she walked away from the field.