Secret Garden

In my memories, it is huge and wild. I'm sure they aren't accurate. I'm sure they make the mistakes of scale that all childhood memories make. I wouldn't care to go back and see it as it is. I like the pictures when I close my eyes. The overgrown rose bushes, the carefully laid out, formal paths overgrown and shabby, the hidden pockets of bare space tucked among seldom-tended, sculptured hedges. The grotto, or was it a cave? Truth be told, it was most likely a caved in bomb shelter. Grass grew on its roof, I remember that. Its bones were cold, damp rock walls. You entered through its sagging mouth, a small step down to a dirt floor and you were underground and yet, not, looking out through its collapsed side at the expansive, formal gardens of a once-grand English manor house turned RAF Officers' Club.

It was where the fairies lived.

No, I wouldn't want to go back and see it. I wouldn't want to stand at its edge and note the buildings close by, the easy view from the big house, where watchful eyes most likely supervised our ramblings more closely than I'd like to admit. I wouldn't want to understand, through my adult eyes, how tame and domestic it was.

To me, to my sisters and I and our two small English girlfriends, it was wild and magic and as removed from our parents as if the back of that shelter kept going forever, into Narnia and beyond. In those gardens, I was different. I wasn't a ragged ten-year-old, awkward with my own body, unsure, in faded pants and an ill-fitting t-shirt. I wore layers of cream and rose tulle beneath my sparkle-dusted wings. In those gardens, my lank hair didn't straggle around my narrow face, it bounced with my steps in pretty curls that never needed any brushing or washing.

That is the magic of secret gardens and deserted bomb shelters and little girls.

I doubt it was perfectly safe. I doubt our parents were far, but they were inside, no question. Any blood required a desperate dash for the big house, the injured fairy trailing along behind, sobbing. I think, if I remember right, there was access to the sea, though I can't remember braving the beach on our own. Perhaps we actually listened. Perhaps we were too enamored of our fairy games to wander.

I know that that same year, when I was maybe ten and my sisters were seven and four, I often watched them alone in our tiny English hamlet and we commonly walked to the sea. About a mile from our village, on one-lane roads that ran along side windy, deserted hay fields. On the beach, we wandered around and looked for rocks that the fairies had carved into hearts because those rocks were wishes. On the way home, we stood on the big retaining wall and threw our wishes into the waves. Big, crashing, white-capped waves swirled with gray and green and deep, deep blue. North Sea waves. I don't know what would have happened if one of us had fallen. Or maybe I do. Those waves were hungry for children.

Can you see the headline? American Child Drowns at Bawdsey Beach. Would you know about it now? No. Only we would know, our own private grief, though the village might remember, there might have been a cold stone plaque in the 600-year-old cemetery of the 15th century church. Commemorating the tragic accident. Or was it shameful neglect? Criminal negligence?

I had an incredible childhood. I knew fairies. I conversed with hungry waves. I hunted wishes.

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Sometimes, I wonder, could I ever give my children the same? Have we analyzed and judged and safety-strapped and recalled and litigated the living stuffing out of childhood?

You don't have to answer that. Just tell me you believe in fairies. I'm working on my answer, which seems to consist mostly of more questions. I'll try to put it up tomorrow.