Childhood Happiness and Dreams

What is Happiness?

 "Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud." –Maya Angelou.

When someone asks, “Are you happy?” I want to answer, “Right this minute? This week? Yesterday?"

Because I don’t believe anyone is happy all the time. Even when I was a child, I was not happy all the time. 

First, I had older brothers who loved to tease me. They often made my life miserable, and I had a father who seldom seemed happy. He was always worried and serious about the farm, the future of the farm, and the business he and his sons had built together. I believe he had an anger management issue. He was quick to take off his belt and whip one of his sons. In those days corporal discipline was accepted at home and in schools. Being compassionate and also concerned for myself, I often ran to my room and cried.   

Gay, my little sister, and I played together every day, and I enjoyed that. I suppose I was happy then, but I never asked myself, “Are you happy?”

 

My baby sister, Gay

Looking back, I remember having such fun playing with the bottles, my sister June’s cosmetic bottles on her dresser. We had to hurry and put them all back in place before she arrived home in the afternoon.

June Council my older sister

I was a happy little tyke when I rode Charlie, the big white horse, led home from the field by my father. After a long hot day of plowing the hard-packed dirt of South Georgia, both man and horse were wet with sweat and tired. But I felt like I was the king of the world sitting high on the horse, higher than I had ever been, and looking down on my father and all the world around me.

 

My love for horses never ended. As a teen, I borrowed a horse. 

The ride to the barn was short. There I was lifted off the horse, and Charlie was put into the large stall in the center of the barn. I don’t remember anyone ever brushing him or wiping him down. He was fed in a trough hanging on the wall of the stable and he could go outside to a water trough, a large syrup kettle which had been used by some farmer who raised cane and made cane syrup at harvest time each year. I never knew where it came from.

Glenda and Gay ready for school

 

I became terribly unhappy when I went to first grade at Mulberry Elementary School in east Albany. It was fine the first week. I enjoyed swinging in the large swing set on campus at recess. I learned to read quickly. I was placed in the reading group with the faster learners. I read the entire reading book right away and then class was boring. I hated to have to sit while others read haltingly about Dick and Jane and Spot, the dog. Run, Spot, run. Run, run Spot.

Looking back, I think that was my problem. At six years old, I was just bored with school. Reading was all we studied in first grade, and I found myself sitting and staring out the window most of the time. As I stared out the window, my mind wandered back to the farm, to my little sister, and to Mother. I became so unhappy I began to cry. When Mrs. Pate noticed me crying, she asked, “Glenda Lou, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

I told her I didn’t know but I wanted to go home. And that was the beginning of many years of being unhappy in school.

At home, once I learned to write in third grade, I found my happiness in writing stories in my composition book. Once I learned to read books that had once been read to me, I filled my time each summer devouring as many books as I was allowed to get off the bookmobile that came to our house on the farm. I lost myself in books about horses.  

Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry was published in 1947. When I learned to read, I devoured that book. The Black Stallion and The Black Stallion Returns by Walter Farley are two vintage books that were my favorites when I was a child.

My creative mind took me to places I had never been and had me doing things I had never done. I was happy then. I made myself a seat in the Chinaberry tree in our backyard and I would sit up there with birds around me and write stories about horses. 

I imagined a life with a horse of my own. That was my greatest desire, my own horse. I felt I would be completely happy if I only had my own horse. It would be many years before that desire was met.