The Secrets of Redding Glen



Dad and Me, Lake Wenatchee

 In 1974 my Aunt Jill, Mom's youngest sister who was probably not even out of her teens, had her own apartment.  She lived with her new husband on the ground floor with a wire spool coffee table and a radio that seemed locked to Carol King.  It's too late, baby, now it's too late.  To me at five years old, she was a redhead star, distant and warm and unknowable. 

At one end of the year or the other, either for a birthday or Christmas, she and Doug bought me a beautifully illustrated children's book, The Secrets of Redding Glen.  Mossy prose fills one half of the landscape spread with the other a naturalist illustration of a bird, a racoon, a mushroom mound, all painstakingly drawn by Jo Polseno. Marsh marigolds and dogtooth violets bloom on the banks of the streams and the first handful of watercress is ready to be gathered.  It wasn't my favorite.

Inside the front cover, in a loopy, uneven high-school script, it is dedicated to me by the young couple.  They were about to head out on their own journey to places they never expected, giving a thoughtful gift to a boy about to have his first baby brother.  I wanted to spend every day driving around our rural Washington apple town with my Mom, with Aretha and Carly Simon, no seatbelt and the windows open to the sky, not thinking much about Connecticut or kingfishers in the twilight.

We never know where our gifts will end up - perhaps ungratefully neglected in a closet for decades, perhaps buried under a lifetime of  "I was too busy".  Many people throw their gifts away, deciding that this vase just doesn't go with their aesthetic, or maybe this crazy idea of being an artist or a chef just doesn't go with their ten year plan.  Once they go down the chute, it's almost impossible to get them back.

Unless Grandma brings that strange, wordy book back in a box on a visit from the West.  It was my chance to try that gift out on Benji, to see if it is a better fit for my introspective, observant little boy.  Benji turned the pages slowly and caught every detail of those drawings.  The fish in the mouth of the heron. The mouse in the next of oak leaves. The dragonfly about to be caught by the barn swallows. He saw things I didn't in this gift and by some unlikely luck I get a second chance to appreciate it.

Knowing both of our tendancies to cry at everything, I'm not sure I could get through a phone call to my Aunt Jill thanking her for giving me another precious minute sharing wonder with my son, a gift completely unintended when given. All these decades later, the ripples from that kind act washed into Benji's darkened room and reminded me of the lasting power of love.  From across the cove comes a new sound, a good sound.  It is the hushed voices of two young boys who have just discovered Redding Glen.