I am visiting my mother, and I have culled from her bookshelves a little stack of books that belong to me, childhood favorites that kept their places on the shelves even as my room stopped being mine. Some of these books are inscribed by great aunts and uncles I barely remember, but the details of the cover illustrations are as familiar as the pattern of freckles across the bridge of my nose. The books feel like family.
One of them is The Secret Garden. It has a spring green cover and a rectangle of roses framing a picture of Mary unlocking the garden door. The illustrations are by Tasha Tudor, and the cover image promises the reader that just as Mary will find a beautiful world when she opens the door, the reader will find a wonderful world when she opens the book. I teach The Secret Garden, which means I read it once or twice a year. I use a scholarly edition of the text that includes articles about the novel and other supplementary material, and it works very well for teaching purposes. But the book itself is not special. It is only words printed on bound paper, paper that is the path into a wonderful story but that has no wonderful properties of its own. The book I had as a child—given to me for my seventh birthday, the inscription reveals—is itself wonderful, magical even. Not because it introduced me for the first time to Burnett’s words. Not because the Tudor illustrations fueled my imagination. The book is magical because it has become a symbol of the presence of The Secret Garden in my childhood. This particular book—this very one—is my story nearly as much as it is Mary’s.
So, I will take The Secret Garden and the other books home, and set them on the shelves in my bedroom where they will remind me who I was. And I believe they will, thus, help me do a better job of being who I am. I don’t need to read them, though I probably will. I need only note their hues in the landscape of my bookshelf, pull them down, from time to time, to enjoy their familiar weight in my hands, and know that those pages hold memory and possibility and me.