THE HAPPY DAY

Evelyn King Mumaw

I’m guessing I was nine or ten when it happened.

One afternoon I was trudging up the road on the way home from school. For some reason I was by myself and loving my aloneness, for then I could daydream as I reveled in doing—daydream about all the years that lay ahead and of what it would be like when I was grown.

It was a delightful, lazy fall day—probably with white clouds in a blue sky and the air pleasant and balmy. Soothing, restful country quiet was all about me, broken only occasionally by an automobile on the Lewis Road in the distance, the mooing of a restless cow, the chirping of a startled bird.

And I was very happy.

Something about that dreamy day made me feel like it was a very special time—a day I would like to remember always.

But then, I thought, How could I do that? So many afternoons would come and go, many like this one. Likely this one will melt into the past and be lost as one of a thousand other days.

I decided to try something I’d never heard of doing. I’d think real hard about this wonderful day, about what it was like, about where I was, about how happy I was. I’d vow never to forget it but to think about it often. And maybe I could remember it even when I was a grown-up, older woman.

That was 70 years ago and more. Guess what, little Evie: I do still remember that special yet ordinary fall day and the vow you made never to forget it.

—Evelyn King Mumaw, Harrisonburg, Virginia, ended her account of generations of ancestors plus her own story through age 13, The Merging: The Story of Two Families and Their Child (Telford, Pa.: DreamSeeker Books/Pandora Press U.S., 2000, pp. 193-194), with the above anecdote, which she wrote at age 80, some three years before the article that follows. Taken together, the writings above and in the article "When Death Announces Its Nearness" provide bookends to a lifetime.