She said yes!
Sitting on our front stoop, surrounded by flickering candles fighting against the cold, I waited for her to come home, not really sure if she would. Big moments – big decisions, questions, life changing events – tend to plod through my system like molasses would on this cooling December night. I think and ponder, wait and wonder for weeks and months, and create a timeline that works in my head, like a square peg shoved into a round hole.
It started in May of this year, fresh into our new apartment. We sat in the sunroom, I held her hand, and told her I wanted to know about her perfect engagement ring. Not only did she show me, but she whisked me off to Winnipeg to see for myself. She was glowing.
We made the decision to set the date for the wedding long before I was planning to formally ask the question. That is the way our lives seem to work out, in a funny backwards series of split decisions alongside long thought out plans for the future. Go to Europe / Japan for a year? Spend another year in school? Move to a grown-up apartment? Get cats? Sure!
My big ideas and elaborate plans for the perfect engagement based on the perfect conditions that I would create with a deft hand and seasoned planning acumen – neither of which I posses in great capacity – began to seem out of place and chunky. I’m not a show-y Casanova, or a sensitive Don Juan. My quiet nature and guarded emotions would give away the element of surprise in an instant.
I threw the plans to the wind and set out to do the right thing, and tried to imagine what the right thing was. As I walked outside, looking for the right ring, the snow began to fall. K loves Christmas, and I took this light snowfall as the sign that it was Christmas already and again, as we had already celebrated twice. I stopped in the street and looked up into the snow as trench-coated public servants passed around me like a soft dark river. I felt calm and certain, and I found the ring.
In the end, the best moments are the extemporaneous ones, pursued with dogged intent and fought over through emotion and hardship. All of the planning had failed to catch one element; the perfect time was now. It was always now, whenever now was, because it was not about when, or how, or why, or what; it was about who. And the who was her.
So I relit the candles that flicker and go out in the cold wind, fix the ones whose wicks are drowning in wax, and watch the exact spot up the street where the shrubs end and I see her for the first time as the girl I was going to propose to – imminently.
She didn’t see me or the look of hope that I had on my face until she was almost nose to nose with me. I looked into her eyes with honestly and love, kneeled on my toque thrown to the ground in chivalry, and asked her the biggest question I would ask anyone in my life,
“KLDS, will you marry me?”
And she said yes.
On days like this, nothing is terrible.
D.
It started in May of this year, fresh into our new apartment. We sat in the sunroom, I held her hand, and told her I wanted to know about her perfect engagement ring. Not only did she show me, but she whisked me off to Winnipeg to see for myself. She was glowing.
We made the decision to set the date for the wedding long before I was planning to formally ask the question. That is the way our lives seem to work out, in a funny backwards series of split decisions alongside long thought out plans for the future. Go to Europe / Japan for a year? Spend another year in school? Move to a grown-up apartment? Get cats? Sure!
My big ideas and elaborate plans for the perfect engagement based on the perfect conditions that I would create with a deft hand and seasoned planning acumen – neither of which I posses in great capacity – began to seem out of place and chunky. I’m not a show-y Casanova, or a sensitive Don Juan. My quiet nature and guarded emotions would give away the element of surprise in an instant.
I threw the plans to the wind and set out to do the right thing, and tried to imagine what the right thing was. As I walked outside, looking for the right ring, the snow began to fall. K loves Christmas, and I took this light snowfall as the sign that it was Christmas already and again, as we had already celebrated twice. I stopped in the street and looked up into the snow as trench-coated public servants passed around me like a soft dark river. I felt calm and certain, and I found the ring.
In the end, the best moments are the extemporaneous ones, pursued with dogged intent and fought over through emotion and hardship. All of the planning had failed to catch one element; the perfect time was now. It was always now, whenever now was, because it was not about when, or how, or why, or what; it was about who. And the who was her.
So I relit the candles that flicker and go out in the cold wind, fix the ones whose wicks are drowning in wax, and watch the exact spot up the street where the shrubs end and I see her for the first time as the girl I was going to propose to – imminently.
She didn’t see me or the look of hope that I had on my face until she was almost nose to nose with me. I looked into her eyes with honestly and love, kneeled on my toque thrown to the ground in chivalry, and asked her the biggest question I would ask anyone in my life,
“KLDS, will you marry me?”
And she said yes.
On days like this, nothing is terrible.
D.
