The Garden

My mother was a child here, in the garden I used to make-believe was a world all mine. My cousins and I would gather by the fountain in the Japanese Garden outside my Nana's bedroom, wash our hands with magic, make our barbies' dance through the moss between the stones, pointing out fairies in the shadows of Torrey Pines.


My mother married my father in the garden after Christmas. She was twenty-one and he was twenty-four. She wore a cotton dress and no makeup and her father delivered the service under the arbor at the foot of the garden where today we have our Easter brunch.

...Where Archer and Fable gather at the mushroom fountain, soaking their hands and good shoes, wiping their fingers on my dress. Where life is busy being lived against the sun.


We hide eggs for the children in trees older than my mother. We pull back branches and flowers, placing delicately within them Archer's hand-dipped creations as my Nana tells the children to close their eyes.

"No peeking," she says.


And they listen. Because magic is worth more than knowledge ever was. Because it's much more fun to discover the truth for themselves. No shortcuts. No cheating. Someday there will be peeking out of fingers but not here. Not yet.


It's a wild garden. Wild like all things wonderful. Maintained by eighty-year-old hands unafraid of dirt under the fingernails. And the children smile and dance and kiss the flowers on their petaled faces with lips chapped from sun, their hair wild from eastern-blown winds, lightly salted, combed by sea with foam for fingers.


When we were children, we would play within the layers of garden for hours and days and weeks the summer long, naming flowers and tripping down cobblestones, tearing our dresses before brunch, Breyer horses in our hands, clip-clop, clip-clop, neiiiiiigh... We made believe until everything was possible. Until truth and fiction were related, cousins and sisters and brothers hidden beneath the the pergola, curling around our ankles like the sweet peas we picked and ate off the vine.


Twenty-five years later, nothing has changed. Except for the bodies that gather here. Flowers and faces reincarnated in baby ferns among the rotting wood.


I remember so much the feeling of being young. Flat-chested in my floral dress with my hair in bows and my sandals scuffed from not caring. And I watch my children, not as their mother but as someone who desires so much to rediscover the world without peeking first.

Show me what you see. Teach me what you know. Direct me toward the nearest fairy. Hold my hand and take me to the blue and purple eggs.


In the garden we are all tiny. Even my grandmother, who gets down in the dirt with the children. Even my teenage cousins who wield baskets in and out of paths, scattering wood chips with their giant shoes.



As a child I lied about the garden when I went outside its walls. Kept the fairies and the flowers and the stories to myself to keep them safe. The garden was a private place where only gnomes and birds could trespass. And my cousins. And my siblings. And me.

Some places never lose their magic. How grateful I am that all these years later, the garden remains as it is this Spring and always.


Ask my Nana why she built the garden and she will tell you ...for the children. And here we are, ageless, together, four generations of boys and girls finding ourselves and each other in new ways.


And we do. Stretched across swings, and among flowers, behind sunglasses and under the hats my Nana keeps in a pile by the door to prevent sunburn. On wood beams, surrounded by flowers overflowing and cracked Terra-cotta pots.


My mother is a child here, now. In this garden, all of us are -- budding year-round, even in the shade. Where time escapes through wooden gates and nothing exists beyond the rainbow of blooms that climb upward toward the sky.

GGC