Malindi would have liked it here

Malindi would have liked it here.

Malindi was a little bookle girl (4? Or 6?), when we watched a movie of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I even have a remembrance of watching it with my mother, Grandma Gerrie, on one of her visits to Maine. My mother, displaced from the Midwest to San Diego, was not used to New England gardens…. where everything withers and wanes and appears dead for many months of the year and then burgeons and blooms magically in the spring. It’s not a secret so much as a surprise.

This weekend I went on an explore (isn’t that what Rabbit and Pooh take Tigger on?) to downtown Grand Junction and, by accident, I followed a sign to a Secret Garden.

I walked down sunny Maine [typo or Freudian]-that should read Main Street, past the specialty shops: knitting, bikes; music; antiques….and there was a sandwich board sign (without a body in it) pointing down the alley-like break between storefronts to “A Secret Garden.” I stood there for a moment deciding if I was just going to the corner bagel shop-with-free-wi-fi that I knew about, or take this, not-really-dark alley, to somewhere new. I took the road less traveled and went down the alley.

I found a square building that looked like an old garage. The sign out front said “Augusta’s Secret Garden—Tea House and Gift Shop.”  I still hesitated, but Augusta, Maine: Augusta, Grand Junction—I knew I was meant to go in. Glen Miller’s Moonlight Serenade was playing. How many people know all the words to that?  The building had been converted from the storage unit for the Montgomery Wards that had been on the front of Main Street. It was now a vintage clothing store/tea house. Glittered pinecones and feathered bird statuary bedecked  table displays by a glowing fake fireplace. The 3 x 6 inch bricks forming the walls had been painted to look like 10 x 15 inch stone walls with painted ivy and bunnies included. An impressive tin ceiling gave ambience and decorative tutus and butterfly costumes and taffeta-studded hats hung all around.  In the back, vintage clothing by the rack was being fondled by patrons.  But me, being just interested in brunch and not pinafores, I had high tea and scones at one of the front tables. My homemade, warm blueberry scone and gingerbread came on someone’s Grandmother’s tea plates. Augusta herself waited on me. My plate came with a spring of shrubry and a dried rose.My bill came with in the shape of a teacup with my name on it.  I got a punch card for free treats if I come 5 times. The place was a dream world for a little girl’s birthday party.  In that regard, it was “a secret garden”—a surprise that I wasn’t expecting….. and Malindi would have like to be here with me.