Memories of the Secret Garden

by SHUHE MA

Achild rambles along the village streets of Tsingtao, China. In no time at all, he is sandwiched in between towering residential complexes. He feels like a small rodent scuttling under the shadows of gray concrete titans. Under the silhouettes, he looks for a trail. Not these criss-cross trails of oily asphalt and gravel that effuse pungent smells under the heat of mid-day sun, but a small meandering trail, one of fine sand and pebbles that would massage his soles. As he searches for the trail, he knows that he has seen it a few times, hidden in seas of green meadows strewn with the purples of lavender and thistle that ripple with the breeze of spring. The air he’d puffed there was crisp. His ankles tickled and moistened with the remains of the morning dew. He climbed onto an old fig tree scarred with broken branches as he yearned for the trail that led to that Secret Garden, never to be found. Lost, he recalls being. Utterly, gloriously lost.

Enclosed and carefully watered since the beginning of his life, the Garden was his childhood sanctuary and a fountain of his youth. Whenever he communed with this arboretum, only the smell of supper prepared by Grandma could pull him away at dusk. The browned bamboo gate was a line between the divinely childlike and the materialistic, a gate that served to flood his eyes with the raw vigor of life. When he squeezed the cold damp soil with his toes, his eyes trembled and his body shivered as if beatles were marching down his spine. From the ruffled pink begonia to the wide flops of Chinese evergreens, and up the yellow bamboo clusters, he saw shafts of light that knifed across the garden and splashed onto the grasses like raptures.

Grandpa was not Grandpa, he was another thing to wonder at and ponder childishly. Shielded from the cacophony, the child learned to marvel at and care for the glory of ephemeral natural beauty. The seed of adventure and amore that would come to define him was born here, in the dirt.

His eyes gleamed at the canopy gauzed by foliage of a young apricot tree. Sometimes, Grandpa brought tools, chemicals, and Chinese medicines into the garden to fight the pests. He watched with quiet fascination, as did the creepers that held onto the concrete wall. In this place,

Years flew by and the child traveled to many places of great beauty. From the scoured dunes of the Gobi to the ragged wet coastline of the Olympics, he followed the path of a friend and became a wayfarer. Always wandering, always secretly looking for the trail to the Garden. He knows that the Garden is long gone now, gone even from maps, alive only in his mind. A thing. A concept. But now the traveler realizes that though the Garden may be vanished and its trail, its physical worldly tether, long since severed, it still lives in his heart and with the laughter of his friends, huddling around a camp stove next to a glacier. It still lives as the trees and the ferns, the creeks and the winds that accompany his life. He just has to find a trail that leads to it again, and become that child once more.