A garden should have pond in it, thought Mary Ann as she dug into the rich earth in the farthest corner of her backyard. Or at least a water feature of some kind. But hers was going to be a little pond, with a tiny waterfall and some water plants and maybe even a fish or two. For years she had wanted one, but since she was blessed with the loving companionship of a pair of Labrador Retrievers, she had never quite had the courage to put one in. The labs would consider it their private swimming pool and it would be lost to all other uses. Moses, named for his penchant for lying in the shallows in the reedy part of ponds, and Gerry, short for Geranium because he loved to eat them, would do nothing but play in the water and then get it all over the house. They never understood why Mary Ann objected to wet dogs in the house or got upset about their lovely muddy footprints on the floor.

Finally, this year, she had put up new fencing and made an “adult humans only” part of the yard, where she had planted lots of flowers and set up a bench swing and a wicker table with chairs – all the things that she hadn’t quite dared to have before because the labs saw everything as a toy – preferable a chew toy. Since she loved her dogs, she had always compromised and had a shared yard with some hardy outdoor people furniture and lots of dog toys. But now, with the yard divided in half, she could have her yard and they could have theirs. Her yard would be by invitation only (and only with heavy supervision) for the labs.

Mary Ann hummed happily under her breath as she made the pit that would be lined, decorated with rocks, filled with water, and adorned with plants over the next few weeks. Finally, with blisters forming on her hands she finished digging the hole to just the right size and shape and leaned on her shovel with satisfaction. The dogs, pinned into their half of the yard, looked through the gaps in the fence and sniffed loudly. They could smell the fresh- turned earth and clearly wondered why Mary Ann wasn’t letting them help with the excavation. They loved to dig holes.

“Not this time, fellows,” she called back to them, and went to put the shovel away and drool over water plant brochures as she ate her dinner. She would appease the dogs with a long session of fetch the tennis ball after dinner.

The next day after work, Mary Ann went out with a roll of chicken wire to start reinforcing the little pool. Strangely enough, she found about two inches of muddy water in the bottom of it. Deciding it was probably run off from a badly aimed sprinkler in her neighbor’s yard, she bailed out what she could and partially covered the hole so it wouldn’t fill up again tomorrow. After it dried out, she would start lining it.

The next day she did not start lining the pond. It was quite full of water, but then so were her yard and all of the neighbors’ yards too. A water main had broken in the alley and everything for a block was wet. The labs had a great time splashing in the water that ran into the yard. Mary Ann used up most of her spare bath towels drying them off before they came into the house for the evening.

The day after that the ground was still soaked and the pond hole still had water standing in the bottom of it. The labs were apparently inspired by the soft muddy earth and dug a hole under the fence from their part of the yard to hers. They spent the afternoon playing in the muddy pool and dug it out a little bit more for her, sculpting the shape into something they seemed to think was more appropriate for a Labrador swimming pool.

Mary Ann growled at them as she scrubbed them off and toweled them dry once more. Then she shut them in the house and called a few friends over for a barbeque-and-line-the-dog-yard-with-buried-chicken-wire-under-the-fence party. Her friends laughed and came and by the end of the week, the dogs were safely jailed in their own part of the yard again.

All week long, the hole had kept water in it. Mary Ann wondered if it was a side effect of the water main break, which was still being fixed because when one break had been repaired, another one had occurred a short ways away. The second one hadn’t flooded the yard, but the alley had gotten wet and the ground was pretty saturated.

Finally, after another week and a lot of very hot sunshine, the hole was dry enough. Since Mary Ann decided that she like the redesign provided by the dogs, she had had to purchase more materials, but finally she was ready to line the pond and put the little waterfall into place. The series of water main breaks (they were on the fourth one) had moved farther down the alley, so the area should stay nice and dry while she worked.

A few days later, she was ready to fill her little pond with its rocky surround. The dogs peered at her with great interest as Mary Ann got out their friend and favorite toy, the water hose/ giant-snake-to-kill and filled the pond. Then she flipped a switch and the waterfall sprang to life. Mary Ann beamed with pleasure and made plans to pick up her new water plants at the nursery on the way home from work tomorrow.

Because she stopped at the nursery, Mary Ann was late getting home the next day. Immediately she saw that the planting of the water plants was not meant to be that day. Moses, who was the mechanical genius of Labradordom, had managed to knock the lock on the gate open. Both dogs were happily enjoying the new pond when she found them. Moses was lying in the shallow part, panting happily, and Gerry was playing bubble with his nose in the water while searching for a rock on the bottom, his tail whipping back and forth the entire time. They both started guiltily when they saw – and heard – Mary Ann come into the back yard.

She removed the culprits, fixed the rock surround, removed various toys and foreign objects donated by the labs from the pond, and then went to the hardware store for a latch that locked. Moses hadn’t figured those out yet. Finally, she took the dogs to a nearby lake so they could play in the water without destroying her pond.

As she fell asleep that night, with the gentle snores of the Labradors coming from their dog beds, Mary Ann thought, “Tomorrow. I should be able to get those plants in tomorrow. After all, what else could go wrong?”

Surprisingly, nothing else did go wrong. The plants were settled in, and a week later, Mary Ann added a few gold fish. She began sitting out beside it in the evenings after she walked the dogs and enjoying the gentle sound of the little waterfall. It was just as well that she could only be out there in the evenings, because all day the alley was filled with the sound of heavy machinery. The water main was up to eight breaks now, just in that alley. It was strange.

One day when Mary Ann came home, though, her little pond was not as it should be. About half of the water was splashed out, and a couple of plants were uprooted. The little goldfish were hiding in the rocks under the waterfall. Mary Ann was puzzled. It looked like the damage the dogs would do, but they were securely behind their own fence. They were dry and obviously innocent, for once. Finally she decided that some wild animal, like a raccoon or something, must have gotten into the yard. It didn’t really work and she knew it, but she really couldn’t imagine what else it could be.

But the same thing happened the next day, and the next. Mary Ann was getting really annoyed and wondered if the dogs weren’t escaping during the day, early enough to dry off again and a neighbor was putting them back. She asked, but all of her neighbors worked all day, and had no idea what she was talking about. The men working in the alley looked at her like she was nuts. They had enough problems with the water lines without worrying about someone’s dogs.

One day she did come home early and found the dogs in the pond. This just reinforced the idea that somehow it was the dogs, although they hadn’t uprooted any of the plants or splashed out much water at all.

It was strange, though, because the latch on the gate was open and Moses had never worked one of those latched before. Maybe he just got lucky, she decided.

The next day, Mary Ann made certain that the gate was unopenable by the dogs and put a tarp over the pond. The pond was supposed to be relaxing, but since she had made it, it had been anything but relaxing. Between the daily damage to the pond and the water main fiasco in the alley (the repaired places had begun springing new leaks), things were not relaxing but instead were interesting. Mary Ann was tired of interesting. She wanted boring and relaxing.

She put the dogs on their leashes and took them for a walk in the park several blocks away. She noticed that the little stream there which was fed by springs bubbling up from deep within the earth was larger than before and then remembered reading in the paper that several more springs had surfaced upstream and had added to the flow of the little brook. Mary Ann decided that this was nice – the stream actually looked like something larger than the flow from a garden hose now.

She walked the dogs home and had to wade through the latest break in the water lines at the mouth of the alley. It had formed a giant pool and was almost ready to start flooding nearby yards. The dogs splashed through it happily, stopping to sniff and wag at something near where the water was welling up. Mary Ann pulled them back, fearing that they would fall into a hole made by the water. The dogs whined and pulled back, but Mary Ann was firm and they continued on home.

The next day, the pool was fine, but the day after that it was vandalized again. Mary Ann was starting to notice a pattern – on days when there was a lot of water from a water main break, her pond was fine. When the water main was sound (which was less and less often) her little water feature was disturbed. The whole thing was very troubling.

And the dogs were acting strange, too. They spent a lot of time whining at the fence and seemed very tired in the afternoons these days. One day Mary Ann shut them in the garage to see what would happen. She regretted that. Gerry turned his enthusiasm for eating flowers into a new skill of eating at the door frame, trying to get loose. He had never done that before. Mary Ann invested in some chew-stopping bitter apple, but Gerry didn’t chew anything else as long as she left them in the dog yard or in the front part of the house where they couldn’t see or hear things from the back yard or alley. Things were definitely strange.

One day, things got stranger still. Mary Ann got off work early one day to run some errands and realized that she had left her purse at home. When she ran by the house to get it, she just parked in front of the house, not bothering with the driveway since she was just running in. If she didn’t pull in the dogs might not notice her and get all riled up thinking she was home for the day. When she got into the house, she thought she could hear a voice from the backyard as well as the sound of the dogs playing in her part of the yard instead of theirs. “Finally -I’m going to find out what’s going one!” she muttered to herself, creeping over to a window. There in the yard, playing in and around the pool were both of her labs and a beautiful young woman. The young woman was laughing and splashing at the dogs as they all hopped in and out of the pool. The dogs were barking merrily, tails wagging full force.

Mary Ann was enraged. She went to the back door and opened it very quietly and carefully. It opened into the doggy part of the yard and was hidden from the view of the pond. She tiptoed over to the open gate and then stepped through it.

“What do you think you are doing?” she shouted in an irate voice. “This is my yard, my pond and my dogs! You are trespassing!”

The dogs stopped. The young woman stopped. The dogs tucked their tails and slunk over to Mary Ann’s feet, where they sat down, leaning against her in apology and effectively pinning her in place. The young woman, who had been standing there open mouthed beside the pool closed her mouth and turned. Mary Ann tried to move towards her, but the dogs were in the way. The woman looked back at Mary Ann and then dove into the pond – the very shallow pond. And she was gone.

Mary Ann untangled herself from the dogs and ran over to the edge. Picking up a stick, she poked it into the now muddy waters. The only things there were the rocks and the plants. Mary Ann had taken out the remaining goldfish long ago.

Stunned, Mary Ann sat down in the chair she kept by the pool and stared at it. She had to be imagining things. She had to be. The dogs whined and sniffed at the water. Mary Ann pulled them back. She didn’t know what was going on, and she didn’t want the dogs anywhere near it. They sat there like that for an hour or more and the then something tickled at the back of Mary Ann’s brain. She grabbed the dogs by the collars and dragged them into the house. She went straight to the computer. A little while later, Mary Ann looked at the dogs, smiled and said, “Well boys, I never would have believed it, but I think we have a naiad infestation.” It was a strange thing to say, but it made a strange sort of sense. Naiads were the nymphs that lived in water. For weeks now, the water mains had been breaking like they had never broken before. And in between the breaks, her pond had been vandalized. And then Mary Ann realized with a jolt that it had all started when the underground springs had surfaced quite a distance away. They had probably gone right under this area before.

“And I think I know why she’s here, too,” Mary Ann told the dogs, who wagged and looked hopefully at her. If Mary Ann was talking to them, she might say the words treat, or ball, or walk, or dinner. They were ever hopeful.

Mary Ann walked purposefully towards the back yard. The dogs followed, thinking playtime might be in order. She grabbed her shovel and marched for her beloved pond.

Digging into the flower bed beside it, she started tossing shovel loads of dirt into the water. “I am not…having…something living…in my pond…that…I didn’t…put there!” she grunted as she filled in the pond.

As the pond filled up with the muddy topsoil, and the free standing water became less and less, something began to happen. The water that was left began swirling and moving around as if it were alive. Finally, when there was only about an inch left, Mary Ann stopped. She said, “All right, come on out. I know you’re in there, and if you don’t come out, I’m going to finish filling this in right now!”

The remaining water swirled and heaved, and then all of a sudden there was the lovely young woman standing there in the mud looking defiant and frightened all at once.

“Most folks would be glad to have a naiad living in their ponds!” Her voice was as smooth as water itself. The dogs whined and edged over to her, wagging ingratiatingly.

“Maybe if the naiad weren’t tearing up the pond and getting the dogs in trouble and causing water main breaks left and right, that might be true. As it is…” Mary Ann replied, staring at the naiad in wonder.

The naiad looked down and shrugged elegantly. “I do as I will. I am a figure of nature and I can’t be stopped.”

“I don’t care what you are, something from mythology or not. This is my pond you’ve been messing up, and my water supply you’ve been playing with!”

The naiad stared back at her. “My spring is gone, my friends have disappeared. Your pond was here, and the pipes that confine the water instead of letting it run freely, and your water dogs were happy to play with me so I won’t be so lonely. The pond was always fixed by the next day, so how was I to know you were unhappy?”

Mary Ann started to say something and stopped. The naiad made perfect sense. Her home was lost and she was lonely and here was everything she was looking for near where her home used to be.

Mary Ann looked at her carefully. “What would you say if I told you I could help you find your old spring? It doesn’t run underground anymore, but it is still nearby. I bet your friends went with it.”

The naiad looked at her suspiciously. “How are you going to accomplish this?  How do I know you won’t dry me out or confine me?”

“I guess you’ll just have to trust me, won’t you,” said Mary Ann.

In the end, the naiad agreed to let Mary Ann try and Mary Ann hauled a bucket with the naiad in it over to the park and upstream to where the springs had surfaced. She got some funny looks from people as she walked by carrying a bucket full of water – towards the stream.

The naiad formed from the water in the bucket and stepped out beside the stream. Sticking one finger into the flowing water, she shook slightly and said, “Yes, this is my stream.” A finger that looked very like hers came up out of the water and touched her back. “And my friends and family are here.”  She turned to Mary Ann. “Thank you. You have returned good for ill, and reunited me with my own kind. I will remember this.” Then she dove into the stream and disappeared.

Mary Ann went home to her dogs. That week the water mains stopped breaking, and Mary Ann dug out her little pond again and repopulated it with plants and fish. Then she went into the dog’s yard and dug them a little pond, too, which delighted them.

She noticed that her little pond stayed clear and clean and flourished, with none of the problems that little ponds are prone to,  and that the dogs’ pond showed frequently showed signs of splashy games being played while she was out.

And sometimes in the evenings, if you looked in to Mary Ann’s yard, you would see her sitting in her chair by her little pond and talking with a beautiful young woman who was half in and half out of the water.

- She Wolf (c)2007

 Grandmother Spring was worried about the cold rocks down below her. They were bare and empty and had no covering to keep them warm, and the year was still chilly, especially at night. She pondered and pondered on this problem.

“What can I do to help the earth stay warm?” she asked herself. “I wish I had a blanket I could put over the rocks to keep them cozy.” She thought and thought as she strode over the land, leaving the bare beginnings of flowers and green leaves in her wake.

The rocks, however, stayed bare and cold. Grandmother Spring shook her head sadly. This just wouldn’t do. Things were supposed to turn green and warm in her wake, not stay grey and cold.

 As she strode through a forest full of tall straight pine trees, she had an idea. She would make the rocks a blanket. That would warm them up, surely. 

She took two of the straightest pines and carefully took off all the bark and branches. Then she polished them to a fine sheen and whittled the tops down to rounded points. Her knitting needles were made. Then she started to look around for the materials to make the blanket from.

A road, made of black asphalt, straight as an arrow, ran nearby. “Too hard,” she said, “Even if it is straight. I don’t want anything that hard.” So she kept on looking.

She looked up at the clouds above her. They certainly weren’t hard, but she thought that perhaps they might be too fluffy to knit with easily. Still, she would keep them in mind.

A field of soft green wheat growing nearby caught her eye. “But if I take the wheat, then that field will be cold, and I don’t want to warm one thing at the expense of another.”

She kept looking and looking.

Then she spotted a wonderful field that had been plowed, but not planted. It too was cold and bare, but it was plowed up in wonderful straight furrows running back and forth across the field. Since it was cold, too, and not growing anything this year, Grandmother Spring didn’t mind using it for her blanket. She picked up one end of the plowed furrows in the fallow field and reeled them in. They came up in one long row, back and forth across the field, and Grandmother Spring wound them into big brown ball that smelled of spicy rich earth. Then she took the end of the furrow-yarn and cast on the first row of her blanket with her pine tree knitting needles.

All too soon, she was out of her yarn, and the blanket was only half done. Sighing, she looked around for another field that had been plowed and left fallow, but she couldn’t see one. They all had tiny green plants poking up through the soil or stubble left from last year.

Then she noticed the river flowing through the fields. It was long and such a lovely shade of blue! It would add a nice stripe of color to her blanket. She went to take the end and wind it up into a ball like she had the plowed field, but then she realized that the river was too big. If she tried to knit with it, just a few stitches would take up almost as much space as everything she had knitted so far. She just couldn’t mix the sizes of her materials like that – not and have her blanket come out nicely.

A stream that fed into the river, though - now that was the right size. She wound that up into a ball, and another stream as well, just to make sure she had enough. She knit the blue stripe into the blanket and looked at it and smiled. The stripe was lovely, rippling in all sorts of shades of blue, and it gave off the sound of a babbling brook when she ran her fingers over it. This blanket was turning out to be a very nice blanket. Still, it needed something else.

Just at that moment, a shaft of sunlight split through the clouds and beamed down to the earth. Grandmother Spring could see the lines of the sunlight in the shaft and she laughed happily. “Of course!” she said, “This is exactly what my blanket needs! Some nice warm sunlight for the last stripe!”

She went over to the beam of sunlight and carefully collected the strands of it. She twisted them and twisted them until they made a light yarn just the right size and then she wound it into a ball. Then she took up her needles one last time and knitted a beautiful golden stripe of sunlight onto the blanket. When the last little bit of the sun-yarn was gone, Grandmother Spring put down her knitting needles and held up her blanket. It was beautiful – the bottom was a deep rich brown, smelling of good clean earth; the next stripe was a rippling blue, dancing with the sounds and colors of living water; the last stripe, at the top, was glowing golden spring sunshine, light and warm all at the same time.

Grandmother Spring spread her blanket over the cold rocks. The rocks sighed and wiggled a little bit, like a child does when a warm blanket is spread over him on a chilly night. Then, to Grandmother Spring’s surprise, as the blanket settled onto the rocks, a bright covering of spring flowers began to grow from it. There were pink ones, yellow ones, blue ones and white ones. Some were vines, hugging the ground, and others reached up for the blue spring sky.

Grandmother Spring laughed in delight, a deep belly laugh that shook the fields and hills. “I should have known!” she said, “Good rich earth mixed with water and sunlight will always yield green growing things! And since I am Spring, the green growing things are flowers, my own beautiful flowers!”

Now the rocks were warm and Grandmother Spring was happy. She went on her way once more, striding over the earth, leaving fresh green leaves and flowers in her wake.

She Wolf (c) 2007

My cousin Robert and I walked down the sandy dirt road. It was right after lunch, and since we couldn’t go swimming again for an hour by our parents’ decree – a lifetime to lively 10 year olds during summer vacation – we had changed out of our swimming suits and gone for a walk.Robert claimed he had found a really neat place he wanted to show me, and since I was allowed to go much farther afield when we were together, I was game and ready to go as soon as our baloney sandwiches, Kool-aid and limp potato chips were finished. We grabbed three cookies each and raced out the back door, the screen banging behind us to the usual adult chorus of “Don’t slam the door!” It was too late. We were already halfway down the driveway and moving fast.

When we reached the small, little used dirt road we slowed down. The fine white sand of the road felt good under our bare feet, and we scuffed our toes deep into it, looking for the layer of damp cool sand underneath. The southeastern U.S. summer heat pressed down heavily and anything cool was welcome.

Robert led me under the big chinaberry tree and past the slough where a small spring surrounded by marsh oozed down to the river. Then we went past a few more houses and fields. When we came to a fork in the road, Robert led me down the wooded branch.

“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked.

“You’ll see. We’re almost there. This is where I got those plums yesterday, remember?Come on, it’s this way.”

Robert left the little dirt road, taking a path I hadn’t noticed deeper into the woods and away from the river. The path itself was clear, which was a bit unusual given the growth rate of wild plants in the hot wet summer weather, but I could clearly see the briars and thorny vines and stiff scratchy bushes growing close by the sides of the path. Well, if Robert could do it, so could I. Neither of us wore shoes, but at least I had a shirt on. Robert, like most of the young boys, only put on a shirt in the summer when he was forced to.

We carefully watched where we put our feet, as snakes were a real possibility, and followed the sandy trail deeper into the woods.

“There’s another way in, but it’s all the way around on the other side,” said Robert as we climbed over a fallen pine tree. We pushed past a last bush and suddenly we were in an overgrown clearing. I could tell that there used to be a house here, and a garden, but it must have been a long time ago. We walked into the area in silence. I stared around me.

There was the foundation of a house, with a chimney rising out of it, surrounded by overgrown bushes and with a pine tree rising out of the middle of what had been the house. There were several ancient crabapple trees and the plums Robert had mentioned. I saw the remains of daylilies about to choke themselves out and rose bushes running wild. The whole place was knee high in grass. Robert grabbed my arm. “Come on, over here!” He seemed a little bit antsy for some reason.

I shrugged and followed him. He led me over to a young plum tree heavily covered with ripe yellow- green fruit. There was no way it had been here when the house had been, so some wild creature must have accidentally planted it. Robert picked a plum and handed it to me.

“Here, eat this,” he said. I noticed that he didn’t have one for himself and was instantly suspicious. We were cousins and best friends, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t above a practical joke. He noticed my look and picked a few more.

“They’re good, really they are,” he reassured me. “Just take a bite.”

I thought about it for a few more seconds and then decided what the heck. I bit through the translucent yellow- green skin and tasted the tart yet sweet juice gushing out. It was very good, and I savored that first bite. I took another bite, and then, hearing Robert sigh anxiously, I looked up with plum in my mouth. Robert was eating his, too, and looking around the clearing. I followed his gaze, and my eyes widened.

The clearing had changed. We were now standing in the middle of a lovely old fashioned garden with carefully raked dirt paths. Roses grew everywhere, and I saw a huge camellia bush. The daylilies were in full bloom as were many other flowers in the bursting flower beds. There was still a plum tree beside us, though, and there were several others too.  The house itself was there along one side of the garden, two stories tall and painted white with porches front and back. A crepe myrtle grew by the house, along with several lilac bushes and there were pecan trees and walnut trees and young crabapple trees here and there. Peach trees dotted the yard and a grape arbor stood a little ways away. I could even see a sizable vegetable garden on the other side of the house where I had seen woods just a few minutes ago.

Robert said, “You see it, don’t you.”

“I see something…”

“The garden. And the house. And the yard. You see them, too, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Oh man.”  The relief was plain in his voice. “I thought I was going crazy. But if you see them, too, then it’s okay.”

I was looking around the former clearing some more.  Beyond the garden, washing hung on a line and I could see a barn with a faded grey exterior. I could smell pigs, too, and as I swallowed the next bite of plum, I realized that I could hear things as well. A mule braying, the pigs grunting, chickens and guinea hens, and last of all, children laughing and shrieking in play - the sounds joined the buzzing of the cicadas that had been there all along. Robert said, “It  all just fades away again after a little bit. I guess the plums wear off or something.” He smiled wanly.

I finished the plum, and Robert handed me another. Without any discussion, we walked away from the plum tree and wandered through the garden. It was fragrant and lush. Insects hummed and buzzed and birds flew everywhere. After a few minutes, we came out of the garden near the house.

There was an old hound dog lying under the porch, but he didn’t seem to notice us. We came closer to the sounds of the children playing and found them playing tag in the shade of a big old hickory nut tree. They were five of them. The oldest ones were about our age and they were strangely dressed. They boys wore faded overalls without shirts and the girls had different looking dresses on. The dresses were very wrinkled, like they were made all of cotton, and just looked strange to my eyes.  I looked again and realized that the youngest one, a toddler, was actually a boy wearing a dress. I thought back to the stories my grandmother liked to tell and remembered that little boys used to wear dresses until they were out of diapers. I turned to Robert and whispered, “I think this is the past. This is like when our grandparents were little, like the stories grandma tells, in the twenties or thirties.”

“I know. It’s really weird, isn’t it?”

The children still hadn’t noticed us, even though we were standing quite near them.

“I don’t think they can see us,” Robert said. “Yesterday, I tried to tell someone ‘Hey,” but they didn’t notice me.”

While we watched, a woman in an old-fashioned dress and apron stepped onto the porch and called, “Dinner!”

The children ran squealing towards the house, and a man dressed in overalls came from the barn. We edged closer to the house and peaked past the lace curtains in the window. The family, including several older children who hadn’t been outside, was seated at a long dining table full of food. Fried chicken, biscuits, dishes of vegetables, all were being passed around the table with gusto. Soon everyone was tucking in. The scene began to fade and I bit into the second plum.

We stayed for at least an hour before we decided we’d better get home before we got into trouble and weren’t allowed to go for walks anymore. We agreed to come back for a while that evening before it got dark.

We spent our afternoon swimming in the river with Robert’s younger brothers. It was nice and cool, and we had fun, but our minds were elsewhere.

As soon as we could, we finished our supper, made some excuses and ran for the road again. We had two free hours before it got dark and we intended to use them.

Since we both knew where we were going, we made good time to the clearing and were soon licking plum juice off our fingers. This time we could hear clinking and clanking in the kitchen along with the sort of argument that children get into over dishwashing. A boy was at the pump on the back porch, filling buckets. An older boy came from the direction of the barn carrying milk buckets. A girl was feeding the chickens. On the porch, an older woman was rocking the toddler and singing to him as his head drooped sleepily against her. We watched the family settle down for the evening, doing chores and just settling down. By the time we left, everyone was relaxing on the porch with newspapers or books and the littlest one had been taken in to bed.

The next few days saw us at the clearing every free minute. Our parents warned us that we were going to get belly aches from all the plums we were eating, and we had some trouble getting away without Robert’s younger brothers, but we still managed to get there twice a day. We learned the names of the children and a little about them – the chores they did, the games they played, the books they read. The littlest one, the toddler boy, loved to run to our plum tree in the garden and beg for the fruit. Usually some indulgent older sibling would pick one for him, and he would sit contentedly in the shade and eat the pieces they sliced off for him. We watched as the mother and grandmother tended the flower garden lovingly, and taught the children to do the same. It was a beautiful, special place that everyone loved.  The whole thing was like watching the stories our grandparents told coming to life.

Our constant munching was threatening our plum supply, though. We had tried other trees, both plum and crabapple, but none of them had the same time travel results that this plum tree did. We knew that we were going to be out of plums soon and our adventures would be over. Finally there were enough for one more day, and that was it. We were really upset by this. We had come to know the family well and were going to miss them very much. Somehow, it didn’t seem like they lived so long in the past; to us they were real and they were now.

That night we were grumpy and cranky. Our parents decided we were overtired and sent us to bed early, saying that we would have to stay home tomorrow because we clearly needed the rest. Robert retired to his house and I to mine next door as our parents sat on the river bank and talked. I fell asleep thinking how unfair life was.

I woke up around midnight, sweating and trembling. I had had a nightmare in which the house in the clearing was burning. I could hear the screams and shouts of the family, see the flames against a stormy night sky as lightening flashed and thunder boomed, hear the timbers crumbling and crashing. It took me a long time to go back to sleep. I was heavy eyed and groggy the next morning, and when I met Robert after breakfast, he was the same.

“I had a dream…” he began.

“The house burned down.”  I said.

“Yeah.”

Our parents’ decree that we stay home all day suddenly was all right with us. We had no desire to go to the clearing today, and maybe not ever again.

Over the next few days, we tried to worm information about the house in the clearing out of our parents without being too obvious. It didn’t do any good, though, because they hadn’t lived here then, and no one knew anything.

Finally, a few days later, we decided to go back and visit the house once more. It seemed silly, I told Robert, to be so upset. After all, they had lived a long time ago. They’d all be grandparents or dead by now anyway, fire or not. He agreed, and we set off. It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon with the threat of a thunderstorm hanging in the distance as we set off down the road one more time.

We were silent as we approached the house. The plum tree was empty, the birds having enjoyed the last few fruit in our absence. We were wandering around the garden area, remembering where things were, how the flowers had looked and smelled, the way the children helped in the gardens, when we heard someone coming. An old pickup ground to a stop at the far edge of the clearing, and an elderly man climbed out of it. We turned to run, but he saw us first and waved to us. “It’s all right!” he called, “I don’t care if you’re here!” Then he ignored us and went to the back of the truck to take out one of those brush mowers. Feeling cautious, we snuck over to the edge of the clearing and hid, watching him for a while. He mowed part of the clearing and cleared away some of the extra growth. At least that explained why the whole thing hadn’t gone back to woods.

Then he stopped by our plum tree. He looked at it for a minute, and then went back to his truck. He brought a large flat stone back to the plum tree with him.  We crept closer, wondering what he was doing.

The old man looked up at us and saw the questions in our eyes. “It’s a memorial stone,” he said in a quiet voice. “For my baby brother.”

“Was he in the house when it burned?” Robert asked all in a rush.

“Yes, he was.”

“Was he the toddler?” I asked with my heart in my throat.

“Yes…” the old man was clearly puzzled as to how we knew these things.

Robert and I looked at each other. I began, “This is going to be really hard to believe, but, well, when we ate the plums from this tree, we saw things.”

“The past, she means. We saw the family here, only they couldn’t see us.” Robert shrugged. “I know you won’t believe us, but it’s true.”

The old man looked at us consideringly. Then he asked a few questions about the family which we answered quickly and correctly.

He nodded. “Well, when you reach my age, you’ll know there’s awfully strange things in life that are real. I believe you. And that fits. My little brother was the only one who didn’t get out of the house. Me and my sisters and brothers, we took his favorite toy that he‘d left under the big hickory tree the night before, and we buried it here, because this was his favorite tree. I don’t know why we did it – I guess it just seemed like the thing to do. I’ve kept a plum tree growing here ever since. I guess he didn’t want to be forgotten, or us to be forgotten, and he gave you the memories. It’s fitting. I’m the only one left, now, and I can’t get here as much as I’d like or do as much as needs doing. I’m glad you can remember the house and the garden and us kids, the way we used to be.”

We stayed there for a long time that afternoon, talking and listening, living in the past in a different way, sitting beside that magical plum tree in the old forgotten garden.

-She Wolf (c)2007

The little girl was kneeling in the dirt of the vacant lot, poking holes in it with a stick, and dropping a button into each hole, patting the dirt back over it afterwards. Poke, drop, pat…poke, drop, pat…poke, drop, pat… She was a thin brown child, with fine brown hair tangling around her head. Her arms and legs and bare feet were thin and brown, too.  The little boy watching her from the refuge of the abandoned car finally worked up the courage to go over to her. “Whatcha doin’?” he asked.

“Making a pretend garden,” came the answer.                                   

“How come?”

“‘Cause I don’t have the seeds to make a real one.”

“No, I mean how come you want to make a garden?” replied the boy, rubbing a grubby tennis shoe up and down the back of his bare leg and jamming his hands in his pockets.

The little girl looked up at him with astonishing leaf-green eyes.

“‘Cause gardens are pretty, and this lot isn’t,” she told him.

He looked around the vacant lot. There were several abandoned cars along one side, and a few straggling bushes along another. The sidewalk at the front was cracked and broken, and the middle of the lot was full of weeds, overgrown grass, trash, and broken appliances that someone hadn’t been able to haul to the dump. He nodded. “Yeah, I guess it isn’t. It’s an okay place to play, except we’re not supposed to ‘cause we might get hurt on the junk.” He smiled. “We do anyway, though.”

“What’s your name? I’m Addy,” said the girl.

“Benji. I’m six. How old are you?” Benji thought the girl looked about the same age as he was.

“Six is good,” the little girl replied.

Benji thought that this was a rather strange answer, but okay, she did look six. “Can I play, too?” he asked.

“Sure. Anyone can play. I wish we had some real seeds, though. I planted some acorns over there, ‘cause I had some, and they’re real seeds for oak trees.” She nodded towards the corner of the lot, where the weeds and grass had been pulled up and soil was freshly turned. “That was all I had, though.” She shrugged and went back to poking holes in the dirt for the buttons.

“Okay. Where’d you get the buttons? I’ll get some, too!” Benji was bored and this was better than nothing.

Addy pointed toward a decaying pile of boxes near the sidewalk. “Over there. I think there’s more. I hope they don’t belong to anybody.”

Benji looked. “No, when people move, they put out piles of stuff they don’t want to take. That’s what that was. Sometimes they leave cool stuff, but mostly it’s trash they don’t want to haul away.” He ran over to the boxes and dug around, coming up with more buttons and some spoons to dig with.

The two children spent the rest of the afternoon pleasantly occupied, digging up weeds and planting buttons, making paths lined with small rocks and planning their pretend garden.

Benji was surprised when he heard his mother calling him home for dinner. “I gotta go,” he said. “Will you be here tomorrow? Where do you live?”
“I live over that way with my mom and my grandma and my two aunts and four sisters, right by a stream.” Addy pointed in the general direction of the edge of town. “Yeah, I’ll come back tomorrow. They’re building some new houses near where I live, and they have bulldozers. I don’t like bulldozers, so I came over here.”

Benji nodded. “Good. I’ll see you tomorrow!” he called over his shoulder as he scampered off.

The next morning, Addy was already there and waiting when Benji ran up, panting. “Look! Look what I got! I told my mom we were making a pretend garden and she gave me these!” He reached into his shorts pocket and pulled out a big handful of paper packets. “Seed packages! These are last year’s seeds, she said, so they probably won’t grow. My grandma got them at a yard sale and gave them to my mom. Mom said if they do grow, good, and we can have ‘em!”

Addy reached out and took the packets, spreading them on the ground and examining them carefully. “This is good!” she said. “This will be much better than buttons! Look, there’s alyssum and daisies and verbena and here’s some hollyhock seeds! And sunflowers, and snapdragons and all sorts of things!”

Benji was impressed. “Wow, you know all the names?”

Addy looked puzzled. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“Well, I don’t. Where are we going to plant them?”

Addy looked around. They had actually pulled up a lot of the weeds and grass yesterday when they were playing. “Let’s pull up some more of the weeds first, and then we’ll figure it out.”

The children spent all that day pulling up the weeds. Several other children that Benji knew joined them, and soon there were children working everywhere in the lot. They pulled weeds and grass and picked up what trash they could, putting it in dumpsters around the neighborhood. They couldn’t do anything about the broken appliances or the cars, but anything they could move, they did. Some of the bigger kids brought shovels. Instead of just digging holes like they usually did, they dug up the soil for seeds.. The soil of the lot actually wasn’t too bad, and it had rained enough lately that it wasn’t too hard for them to dig up. Some of the other children brought seeds, too, and a few days later, they laid all the packets on the ground to decide what they would plant where.

It was a lively discussion, but they all listened to Addy because she seemed to know what she was talking about. After a whole morning, the plans were made and committed to a piece of scrap paper. Each seed packet had a destination, now, and all the children got busy planting the seeds. Every child took a turn hauling water for the garden.

Every day the children came back and watered their seeds and pulled the persistent weeds. They were hoping against hope that the old seeds would sprout and bloom.

The adults had been watching this project with interest, and a few began to contribute to the project. One day, the man who owned the hardware store showed up with some droopy looking plants in pots. “These didn’t get watered the other day, and I can’t sell them because they look like they’re going to die,” he said. “Why don’t you kids take them and plant them here?” A grandmother showed up with some extra plants from her garden, and one Saturday a couple of men came with a trailer and hauled away the broken appliances. They came back with a load of old bricks and spent the afternoon helping the children make real paths where the paths had been marked out with rocks.

Another day, the man who owned the junk yard towed away the junked cars. The bushes got trimmed up, and then the miracle began.

Tiny green shoots started poking their heads up through the dirt. Addy just nodded and said, “Well sure. That’s what seeds do. They grow.”

The seeds grew astonishingly well. Along with the seeds, the attitude of the neighborhood was changing, too. The people began to clean up more than just the vacant lot, and flowers began sprouting in flower boxes and pots and small beds everywhere. The broken sidewalks were weeded and a few were taken out and replaced. Window sills and doors showed fresh paint. The people of the neighborhood were taking some pride in where they lived.

Addy just cocked her head and said, “My grandma said this would happen. She said beauty spreads in spite of people.” She added, “Sometimes she doesn’t like people much.”

The children continued to water and weed and care for their garden. Summer afternoons would find them working there, or sitting on the benches they made from scrounged boards reading books or talking. The littlest ones would pick the bright flowers and take them to their mothers as gifts. The adults began to go there and walk and talk after dinner. It was so pretty and relaxing, they just couldn’t stay away, and the children were proud to share their garden.

By the end of the summer, all the seeds had grown, and all the flowers were blooming. Benji’s mother shook her head in disbelief. “Those seeds shouldn’t have done that well,” she said, “Old seeds never do. And those hollyhocks- look at them. They aren’t supposed to bloom until the second year!” But there they were, tall spikes with pink and red and white flowers swaying proudly in the gentle breeze. There was another surprise, too, as the summer ended. The corner where Addy had planted the acorns had been left alone as the children planted the flowers. But now, there was something growing there, too – seven small oak trees. They were growing at an incredible rate. Nearly overnight, they went from seedlings to strong young saplings. The lot was now a riot of color and beauty.

One day, right before school started, the children realized that Addy hadn’t been there for a while. Benji asked his mother if she could help him find where Addy lived, to see if she was okay.

“Which one is Addy, honey?” she asked. “I never did figure that out.”

“She’s the thin brown one with brown hair and green eyes! How could you miss her?” he said.

“Well, I wasn’t out there that much during the day so maybe I just didn’t see her,” replied his mother. She asked the other parents, but none of them knew which one Addy was, either. The children were puzzled by this, but then the adults really hadn’t been there that much during the day when Addy was around.

Benji’s mom took him to the edge of town near the stream, where construction was going on and the bulldozers were, as this was the best idea anyone had for finding Addy.

There were no houses, no trailers, nothing but the construction crew. Finally, Benji’s mother asked the men working there about any homes nearby, and if anyone remembered seeing a small brown girl with brown hair and green eyes.

“No, no one lives anywhere near here,” the foreman told her. “I’d remember, too, because I fish all up and down the stream here. We’re being careful to leave that alone – it’s so beautiful, there, with that old grove of oak trees. It’ll make a nice addition to this housing development.”

Benji and his mother thanked him and walked over to the stream and the grove of trees. It was beautiful, and when the bulldozers were silent, it was peaceful. Benji wandered away from his mother and walked among the trees – a huge old oak in the center, and three smaller ones ringing it, with still smaller ones on the outside. He looked up. The leaves were exactly the same shade of green as Addy’s eyes. He thought he heard a giggle behind him, and turned around rapidly. There was no one there. But the giggle had sounded like Addy’s! He heard it again, behind him again. When he turned, he thought he saw Addy out of the corner of his eye, but then there was nothing there. He wandered sadly back to his mother. “I thought I heard her, but there wasn’t anyone there,” he said.

His mother got a funny look on her face and said, “Did Addy ever tell you her last name, son?”

“Yeah, but it was something weird – Dry something, I think.”

“Dryad?”

“I think that was it. Why, are you going to look her up in the phone book?”
“No. I think we’ve found her. Let me tell you a story from a long, long time ago, in ancient Greece…”

-She Wolf (c) 2007