The Secret Garden

Early on in this blog, I mentioned my neighbor, Betty. Smart, fit, sassy and irreverent, she is what I want to be when I'm 80 yrs. old. Betty comes and turns on water from a hose bib in our lower garden to water the small neighborhood veggie plot above. In exchange, I can pick all the veggies I want. She calls our lower garden The Secret Garden because you really can't see it much from the street and it's necessary to go down the steps before experiencing the full effect.

Five years ago when Leola moved from Coos Bay to Portland we had to get rid of many things, but it was hard to part with all the rocks and stones she had collected over the years and had decoratively placed in her front yard. She had thousands of them and many were quite large. During the move when I was in Coos Bay, I began piling many of the rocks in the back of my car thinking we could display them in our yard and Leola could still enjoy them. We had movers coming to move her stuff, but it seemed absurd to pay someone to move a bunch of rocks. However in light of what actually did get moved (see June blog entries), the rocks would have been one of the better choices. Anyway we moved a small portion of them - not as many as I wanted - and laid them in a spot under a hose bib in the garden below. Last year we had some repairs for water damage to our house and moved them so they wouldn't get lost or trashed. They sat in buckets under the house until this summer. One Sunday in July, Jon and Leola spent the whole afternoon, washing and placing the rocks back where I had put them 5 years ago - just like she used to do with them in Cos Bay.

Now mind you, I'm not into "cute stuff" and Leola is. She put a few rocks with cute faces painted on them that had come from the porch of her apartment at Northwest Place in there, but I let it go. This is, after all, her house, too, now.

But back to Betty and the secret garden. Betty's young grandchildren visit her periodically. The other night Jon and I noticed from the kitchen window as she brought several children as well as her husband and another neighbor with his two kids down the stairs to our lower garden. Today when I was working out in the yard Betty couldn't wait to tell me how the kids delighted in seeing the "secret garden" and the rocks. They just loved the rocks with the faces on them.

She exclaimed, "That was better for them than 20 Disney movies! They were also in awe of the rabbit bench."

The stone rabbit bench or "bunny bench" as we call it, came from Jon's sister Bonnie's yard after her death last November. It weighs a freakin' ton and I remember Jon and Daniel struggling to carry it out of her yard and into our car the day before Thanksgiving last year when our grief was so still so raw. Both Bonnie and Leola would be happy to know their whimsical garden fancies are sparking the imaginations of another generation.