September’s Resolve

Happy Thoughts

by Brenda Ethridge Ferguson


In September, I will think only of happy times. 

I will think
 of October sunshine and apple picking
in the New England countryside.
 I will remember
 snowdrifts throughout an English wood at night,
reflected moonlight flying up like a magic
 carpet 
among the outstretched arms of yawning
trees. I will recall the fan of paper bells and 
silver icicles hung about flickering hearths
on Christmas Eve. I will think of misty, Texas
mornings as purple martins arrive in swooping 
flight across spring’s crayon ditches and seedling
fields. I will return to the summer air— 
fat with the squeals of joyful cherubs and
lightning bugs and churned ice cream
and to shooting stars and the Milky Way spread
against a chocolate sky.

I will not think of those Septembers, 
my love, that left us bereft, vacant,
parentless. No, I will think only
happy thoughts.

My husband and I have almost made it through yet another September. We lost all four of our parents in September (different years), so I, at least, have to work at being cheerful during this month. Our dads and mothers have been long gone, but as the cliche goes, it seems only yesterday they left. Everyone who is blessed to live a long enough life goes through this loss, a knowledge that does not increase my cheerfulness. Several years ago, I spent my birthday, with much of the family, in the ER after my dad suffered a stroke. He died a week later. Three years later my husband and I spent my birthday in a different ER with his father. He died three days later on his daughter’s birthday. My mother was buried on my brother’s birthday. I know people who have much greater sorrows and know how highly blessed we are to have had wonderful parents, but emotions are emotions, I guess, ones I can sometimes write about but have a difficult time talking about. In a rather self-indulgent moment, I wrote the poem above.