Well, she said, I used to think happiness was a flower. Now I know it is a brick buried in the flower bed.

Aunt Agatha was a very tall woman, absentminded, with craggy grey hair and perennial runs in her stockings. She liked to drop in now and then to wash my dishes, or if they were done, we would do something equally entertaining, like drinking coffee while painting my furniture. It was especially entertaining if the paint was not coffee coloured.

Ah, I said. Tell me more. I was young then, and did not like to laugh at my elders, supposing that seriousness had great virtue. I have since seen the fault of that theory.

My aunt lifted her brush from her coffee cup and lay it gently on a new issue of my husband’s favorite periodical. Happiness, she said. Everybody wants to be happy. And what is happiness, everybody looks here or there, or they sigh and wait for winter to be over so the flowers will grow. But I have learned, she said as she poured a fresh cup of Steamtrain’s Whatchamacallit Peaberry, that happiness hides in the dirt. You might up-end your whole yard looking for it, or you might be content and plant flowers and give flowers away to the neighbors and look at flower books and catalogs all of drifty January. And then about August when you dig for your garlic among the blooming coneflowers, a bee bumbles down your collar and stings you between your shoulder blades. So you sit on your garden bench applying baking soda with a fly swatter or a bath brush, and suddenly you realize you are happy.

I knit my brows and dipped my brush. Ah, yes, I said. But I did not get it then, being young and optimistic and hampered by high ideals.

Loree, jan 29, 2019