Sunny Side Up: A little child will lead you

By Kathleen Gibson

I happened on a child’s secret summer place one day.

At the end of the lane where I walked, a small grove of small trees grew almost in a circle. Their limbs met overhead, forming a leafy umbrella. The lower branches had an opening just high enough for a child to enter. Thick foliage hid the little refuge from passersby.

I ducked low and tiptoed into another world. A cathedral of sorts.

The sun filtered softly through the living green, and all was quiet. Not dead quiet—country quiet. Breeze-rippled leaves muffled the sounds of the nearby street. Sparrows twittered.

I felt, oddly, the presence of the absent child. The one who’d arranged the broken twigs so carefully into teepee formations. The creative sprite who’d left the blue bucket, half full of sandy soil, lying beside the miniature dirt paths; who’d strung kitchen string from tree to tree, clearly marking no entry except at bushy door where I’d slipped in.

Careful to disturb nothing, I backed out, remembering well the sacredness of such spots. Though the Port Moody house I grew up in is long gone, the secret places of my own childhood remain eerily unchanged.

The firs and cedars still stand sentinel along the shores of Burrard Inlet. Their snarled roots grope for footholds on the small incline that leads to the water’s edge. Some of those giants grow in clumps and circles too, like the smaller trees I saw today, and their branches swing low, heavy with cones. It was like that decades ago too.

My secret places were cool, even on summer’s hottest days. And dark. The sun had dappling privileges only. Stories up, it poked curious rays through the evergreen lace. Rays that fell limpid and pale on my face.

The floors were springy layers of fragrant needles and crumbling red slivers of rotting fir stumps. My sister and I played by the hour, serenaded by the mews of gulls. We became important people there; exiled remnants of royalty, princesses hiding from pirates, queens and empresses escaping from throne duty for an hour. A day. A lifetime.

We licked our lips and tasted salt inlet air. We gorged ourselves on fat red huckleberries growing in sprays from old stumps and blackberries well-concealed under tangled masses of thorny vines. We squealed with proper royal indignation at spiderwebs and pretended the lichens draping the branches were pirates’ beards, (who we must have commissioned our knights to kill, though I don’t recall that part).

I happened on a child’s secret summer place that day. It reminded me not to forsake imagining. Suddenly all my wishful thoughts, my impossible prayers, my secret dreams separated themselves from the desperate need to do, do, do, and floated, glimmering, to the surface. And once again, they seemed possible.

Thank you, child at lane’s end. Jesus said I must be like you.

Sunny Side Up has inspired readers with glimpses of everyday life and Christian faith since 2001. Contact Kathleen at sunnysideup.press@gmail.com