Secret Garden

Did you have a favorite hiding place or haven when you were young? The nook of a tree, inside an overgrown garden, a flat roof or window ledge? Mine was a water oak swamp forest at the end of our street.

The First Woods, as we kids named it, was a well-explored oak, maple, and beech forest, with at least one patch of sassafras, with leaves that tasted like root beer. I named that forest my “Bambi” woods, and savored the paths to the wide field beyond. A tall, old hickory tree stood at the edge of a one-lane dirt road. The nuts were hard to crack, but the meat was delicious, like intense walnuts.

My hideout was in the Second Woods, the swampy, mosquito-infested forest, the forest forbidden by my mother because of muck and isolation. Naturally, my brothers and I went as often as possible, my brothers in the wintertime to skate, as well as during summer for frog catching.

I eagerly waited for the first sound of spring peepers, bundled in my warmest jacket, and headed for the narrow, barely seen path that led to the one tree with a branch low enough and sturdy enough for settling. Ponds and swamps surrounded every winding passageway in the interior. Spring peepers and frogs sang ceaselessly. Mosquitos swarmed, yet there was something magical and mystical about the woods.

As a child, I decided that Merlin played his flute somewhere outside of my hearing. Why Merlin? And why a flute? Part of it was because I associated the Second Woods with one song from the Lerner-Lowe musical “Camelot” … Far from day, far from night, out of time, out of sight, in between earth and sea, we shall fly, follow me… (Alan Jay Lerner), the song sung by Nimue to entice Merlin.
Even now, decades away from those magic spring and summer afternoons, the sound of spring peepers or the sight of a water oak forest, a stream through the woods, wood-surrounded ponds, can bring back the magic.

What’s your secret garden?