A Little Scene About Being Happy

            “How are you doing, Honey?”

            “I’m good. I’m feeling happy.”

            “Well, that’s a nice thing to hear. And why are you so happy today?”

            “I’m always happy, Mommy. I don’t know why. I just feel fresh and clean inside, like the wind just blew all the bad stuff out of me.”

            Dinah looked down at her daughter who was sitting on the edge of the porch staring past the sparse lawn to a thickly wooded area beyond. Though she was only ten years old, Sara already had developed a unique way of describing her world. She looked at her mother and grinned. Her lips held the smile, but her deep, blue eyes reflected her happiness as well. For Dinah the look dredged up an old demon, envy.

            “I don’t know how she does it,” Dinah mused. “We don’t have the best life.”

            The two lived alone in a small, rundown cabin at the edge of town.  Three years earlier Jake Williams, the man who had fathered Sara but refused to marry Dinah, had deserted them.

            “Not the marrying kind, Dinah,” he had told her bluntly with a truth that created tension in their relationship from the beginning. Fortunately no more children followed, for when Sara was only seven, Jake slipped out the front door in the early dawn carrying a duffle bag jammed full with his meager belongings and never returned.

            Dinah relied on her own tenacity then to keep herself and her daughter somewhat solvent, but the long hours spent waitressing at the Cinnamon Café had taken its toll. Though she was only thirty-four, she looked ten years older.

            “Are you happy, Mommy?” Sara asked.

            “Yes,” Dinah lied. “Sometimes.”

            “Not all the time?”

            “Just sometimes.”

            “Well, I like to be happy all the time,” Sara asserted.

            “And how do you do that?”

            “I don’t know. I just hold it in my heart. I say I am and just like magic it happens.”

            “You’re an enigma, Sara. Wish I could climb into your brain and reside there with you,” Dinah smiled into the beaming face of her daughter.

            “You can, Mommy. Just choose it.”