The garden has gone a little feral this October, which I mean as a compliment.
We grew approximately a million sunflowers, most of them volunteers. The nasturtiums are going off, the butterfly bushes have gone brawny and sort of threatening, and my dahlias—neglected, with spent blooms surrounding the fresh ones—are going strong anyway.
The marigolds came through in force, which matters because every year we make marigold garlands for my daughter’s October birthday. This is now enough of a tradition that she would be offended if the marigolds failed us.
The kitchen garden has been somewhat less triumphant.
There are tomato plants carrying what feels like several hundred pounds of determined but very green tomatoes, and every day I look at them and wonder whether they have any intention of becoming edible before winter. There is also one small pumpkin, which at this point deserves recognition simply for making it this far.
Fortunately, The Secret Garden is largely a celebration of the ornamental garden, so we are doing very well by those standards.
A friend handed down her copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book to us, and we have been reading it outside in fits and starts: in Adirondack chairs under the shade of our massive, swaying sunchokes; on blankets in the grass; surrounded by flowers apparently unaware of the date.
I read The Secret Garden as a child, but somehow retained almost none of how gothic the text is. Like Jane Eyre, but for kids.
A huge gloomy house on the moor, dead parents, illness, shut-ins and shutaways, strange noises in corridors, loneliness, despair, and a general air of decrepitude. People are pale. People are cross. People are mysteriously confined to rooms. There is a surprising amount of doom before anybody gets around to planting anything.
Then, gradually, the door opens.
Mary goes outside. She finds the garden. She starts paying attention to birds and dirt and thinking of other people. She becomes interested in something beyond herself and, in the language of our house, slowly learns not to be such a pickle.
That is probably the part I remembered.
We have logged a good portion of the book outside this fall. Sometimes we pull the Solo Stove over toward the garden. Sometimes we put down a blanket and bring out snacks. The kids come and go. The dog installs herself directly in the middle of things. Sometimes it’s just a few lines, but other times we log a chapter at a time. The fire burns, and the light changes.
None of this is particularly elaborate, which may be why I want to keep doing it.
The fire changes the reading just enough.
Without it, we are outside reading a book aloud. With it, reading by the fire becomes a little more of an occasion. We stay longer. We pull the blanket closer. Somebody adds another piece of wood. The garden gets darker around us. Those little blue gnats we get here in Idaho hang in thick clouds above us, and the center of things stays warm.
Reading aloud changes the pace, too. We are all in the same part of the story at the same time, stopping often for questions about words they don’t know, or because something in the book needs a little explaining.
And The Secret Garden is a particularly good book for this. It is, after all, a story about what happens when people get out of gloomy rooms and go outside—when they start paying attention to weather, dirt, and growing things, and eventually to one another.
Reading it aloud in an overgrown October garden, beside a real wood fire, has almost certainly colored this reread for me. I suspect years from now I’ll remember the story along with the green tomatoes that refused to ripen, the marigolds waiting to become birthday garlands, the dog on the blanket, the kids wandering in and out, and the smell of smoke settling into everything.
As for the backyard fire itself, we kept it simple: a Solo Stove, a fire starter, dry Western Red Cedar kindling, and firewood. Strike the match, get the kindling going, add the firewood, and then get back to the book. Starting a fire does not need to be the evening’s main project.
That is more or less how we use our fire starter and cedar kindling: for backyard fire pits, fireplaces, and wood stoves where the objective is simply to get a real wood fire going without turning the beginning into an ordeal.
Which is, I think, the point.
A wood fire asks you to participate, but it does not have to become the whole event. Sometimes its job is simply to make the place warmer, hold you there a little longer, and become part of the memory of whatever happened around it.
In this case: The Secret Garden, a feral October garden, and a few more chapters read aloud before dark.
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