Shatteringly Happy

The title of this post comes from a line in Dorothy Sayers' book Gaudy Night when Harriet says the something about being "shatteringly happy".

I have a few childhood memories of such a feeling, where all the world was right and there was nowhere better in all the world than where I was right now. Most of them come from a time and place that now seem trivial in comparison to other experiences of my growing up years and yet somehow perhaps it is part of the unimportance that makes them quietly affecting.

That time and place was a house in the country owned by my step-father's sister-in-law's sister or rather it was owned by Mary who was a sister of Sarah the wife of William, my step-father's brother. The sister needed a house sitter/renter while her family moved to some location in a different part of the country. The details of this are now lost in my memory, the conversations had by grown-ups intended for other grown-ups only vaguely remembered as they were had over my head, literally.

The house was what is a called an "A-frame" and sat on top of a hill overlooking a Christmas tree farm. I was quite young at the time, at least less than 10 and had lived always in the suburbs in an assortment of townhouses, apartments and trailers. It was like living in a book.

It may have not been the first day we moved in, but soon thereabouts the neighbors that lived on our same private dirt road came up to meet us. I still remember Mrs. Howard standing on the front lawn talking to my mom with a baby on her hip. She would always have one there or be pregnant; their family had 10 kids last time I knew, but in those days there were only about 4 of them. Mrs. Howard also introduced us to the two oldest children, girls, who were about the same age as my sister and I; the oldest a little older than I and the next about the age of my sister.

It would be these two girls that the memories of that time would be formed with. Ice skating on a frozen pond, swimming in the pond in summer (but only after all the snapping turtles had been caught), watching a fast-moving summer thunder-storm bring a freak tornado across the pond from the the porch of their house, playing school in the living room, causing an unattached horse trailer to rock back and forth on it's single pair of wheels; each of these memories leaving an indelible impression.

The two moments when I especially remember being so happy that it was almost as if I couldn't move and just wanted time to stop and remain there for a few moments so that I could just enjoy the feeling of perfect happiness involved the four of us making some plan of our next course of action. Everyone was excited, no one had become grumpy about something or other and we all knew what we want to do. One moment was when we planned to go out in the woods and pretend to be Indians and Joli Howard (the oldest) got permission to build a fire. What could be better? We would be real Indians. I think that was also the time that Jenny Howard brought us margarine instead of butter to eat on our bread that we'd brought along. How we gave her a hard time for that. The other moment involved some game of pretending we were orphans, but my mom came to get my sister and I to take us home for dinner just as we had everything planned out, so in a sense that moment was preserved.

Perhaps, it wasn't the actual doing of those carefully made plans that made me so shatteringly happy, but it was the feeling of being able to do whatever we wanted, being our own creators of the world in which we lived and the camaraderie of friends with the same goals and desires.