I had been dating Chris for 4 years and we had talked about engagement and he knew how badly I wanted to marry him. Well, I knew that he had the ring but I am so impatient that I kept hinting that he should propose to me.
After a while he got really sick of it (who wouldn’t) so I stopped and figured it would just happen when it happened. We went to his parents’ house one weekend on a visit when he said he wanted to take a walk down by the creek with our puppy. So we start to walk down there and it was just gorgeous, a crisp sunny Wisconsin fall morning. We reached the creek and I saw a porcelain cow sitting on a rock in the creek. I figured Chris’s nephew Dylan had left it down there while playing. Chris reached down and picked it up and that’s when I realized it was a butter dish – he opened the dish and in the little pad of butter was the ring! I immediately started to cry.
There is an old Irish tradition where a man takes the woman he wants to marry to a stream or large tree (signs of eternity) and presents her with butter (which in the famine years of Ireland was like gold). As he presents her with the butter he says a beautiful Irish wedding proposal. (O woman loved by me, will thee giveth thee thy heart, thy soul, thy body…)
Chris and I are both Irish and when he hit one knee and recited the poem I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was so perfect and so traditional I never thought it would happen like that!
