We buried Aunt Virginia Saturday. And as is the case when all the cousins assemble in one place “the good old days” were remembered. We wandered in our memory once again down that certain street, gathered at the park, played our games and pranks on each other, and generally resurrected younger days.

Those good old days! I remember siting on the porch on one of my elderly members once. We rocked back and forth and talked about how things were. Something prompted me, and I said, “Tell me about the good old days.”

He rocked a bit more and then he gave forth with a soft chuckle. He said, “The good old days, well, I was born in ’02. They must have been before that.”

Returning home from Aunt Virginia’s grave, after we cousins talked of our “good old days,” I saw a bumper sticker on a car in the next lane. It read: “No bad days.” It was cold that day, the wind, as we gathered around the grave, was biting. And now as I traveled home the car’s heater seemed too slow in providing me warmth.

No bad days! I’d just buried Aunt Virginia. She became a young lady in the midst of the Great Depression, a time of hunger and having not. But still, even though when she died she was well-off, over the years Aunt Virginia shared stories of back then when there were bad days.

Here we are in these economic difficult times. Every day I hear stories of people who are encountering the bad days and some of those bad days are becoming an endless refrain to a tired-out song. There are celebrities who have fallen; there are the famous who have made wrong choices; there are lives being tragically torn asunder. There is the war and the deaths, the starvation and disease. A large share of life is filled with bad days.

Alcohol sales are on the rise during our time, the divorce rate increasing. The cause is attributed to the bad days we are experiencing.

Aunt Virginia told me that back in those bad days almost everyone went to church. Back in those bad days folks prayed a little more. But whenever she talked of those days there was a smile on her face. She didn’t dwell on the difficulties that were her family’s. She talked about playing, of pitching in together to raise the chickens and collect the eggs, of plowing and planting the vegetables. “Oh, my goodness,” she’d tell me, “you should have seen your Mama back then. She was a hoot.”

There are bad days and good days. I suppose it depends a lot on one’s perspective as to which the day is. I’ve learned over the years that there are no bad acts of kindness. there are no bad expressions of compassion. There are no bad ways to say I care about you. There are no bad ways to be thankful, and there are no bad results that ever come from having been thankful in all things.

So I rode home in the cold from Aunt Virginia’s grave and I thanked God that winter had arrived. I thanked God that the car was running though the heater was slow in waking. I thanked God I had a home to go to.

Aunt Virginia taught me that whether its good days or bad days really depends on how you live your days.