The Secret Garden

While pregnant with our first little one, in December 2007, I decided on the nursery's theme: Norman Rockwell's Four Seasons prints. Each picture depicts quintessential childhood. Spring shows girls and boys running home from school, surrounded by large trees boasting fresh blossoms. Summer shows a boy in overalls, seated atop a rustic fence, dog at his feet, watching a train pass by in the distance. Well, you get the picture. When we miscarried, I tucked away the idea and repurposed the deep red curtains I'd already sewn in anticipation of the nursery. This past summer, while anticipating Ellen's arrival, I debated the Norman Rockwell idea. At closer glance, the more prominent children in the prints are, indeed, boys. Would a little girl still see the pure joy of childhood, unencumbered by technology, or would she feel left out while the boys went sledding down the snow-covered hill? I opted to see it through and ordered the prints. I even got Jordanian Frame Guy to frame them. And then we moved to Charlottesville and found this amazing house to rent, complete with a Secret Garden. A what?!

The second bedroom, used by the owner's own little girl when she was born, is adorned with wallpaper I affectionately call "Secret Garden". Its lattice work is covered in ivy and little pink blossoms. It's busy, to say the least. Norman, in his simple color palette of earthtones and warm reds and oranges, just wasn't at home in the Secret Garden. Our compromise was to hang Norman in the hallway, leading to Ellen's room, and let the Secret Garden wallpaper be the room's art--all on its own.

After finishing Anne of Green Gables, I needed another book to read with Ellen during our nursing times together. Thanks to the multitude of classics available for free for the Kindle, I noticed The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and thought, "How perfect!" The added bonus is, despite knowing the story and having seen the movie, I had never read the original text. So we dove in, and I quickly wanted out. My tongue tripped over the wording and struggled to keep up with both a British accent and a Yorkshire dialect. [I'll be curious to see how Ellen's first words turn out, with all these accents she's been listening to (Same Kind of Different as Me had her mom speaking like a southern black man, after all!).] The story itself seemed to move rather slowly, dryly. But I'm trying to turn over a new leaf and not abandon projects, books, resolutions I've resolved to see through. So I kept reading, and just like the garden in the book, my love for the story blossomed with time.

As a new mom, I learned the dangers of indulging a child simply because she cries. [Or, as Dickon's mother would say, "th' two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way--or always to have it. She doesn't know which is th' worst."] I learned that children do, indeed, need to be taught certain things, like asking for permission or recognizing authority and submitting to it. And I also learned that children need children, and laughter shared is better than any medicine. Much like my Norman prints and his depiction of childhood lived out of doors, Mary shifts from a dull, apathetic child to one awake in her own world:
"[She] had set her inactive brain to working and was actually awakening her imagination. There is no doubt that the fresh, strong, pure air from the moor had a great deal to do with it. Just as it had given her an appetite, and fighting with the wind had stirred her blood, so the same things had stirred her mind. In India she had always been too hot and languid and weak to care much about anything, but in this place she was beginning to care and to want to do new things."

And in the end, I learned anew the power of thoughts. "When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood." Hmm...just like Philippians 4:8, in the Bible: "...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." Or, put in more country terms, "Where you tend a rose, my lad / A thistle cannot grow." I have certainly struggled with discontent, thistle-y kind of thoughts recently. Kyle would agree that I have been "Mistress Mary, quite contrary" on too many occasions. Just as the gardener comments on Mary in the book, Kyle commented about my appearance changing in accordance with my disposition. I'm far prettier, he says, when I'm happy and loving.

Who knew a children's book, read on account of some wallpaper, could offer such timely medicine to my heart?