What I'm Reading: The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden isn’t a shiny, new, hot-off-the-press novel, but a timeless classic, especially wonderful for reading at springtime. 

I’ve read this almost every spring since I was a little girl, and know when it’s time to pull my copy out when I start walking laps around my yard, waiting for my flowers to press up through the dirt.

In The Secret Garden, nine-year-old Mary Lennox is sent to stay at her uncle’s mansion. The enormous mansion is gray, dreary, cold and empty. While Mary explores her new home, she discovers the gardens, particularly a mysterious walled in garden with a locked door. She finds the key, and begins to work in the garden, finding friends and watching the garden come to life. As Mary spends time in the garden, the mansion and the lives of the people in it begin to grow, and change, and blossom too.

This book is an invitation to renewal. An invitation that a dark, gray, empty life can thrive again. That something so achingly empty can become abundantly full. And that is a beautiful thing.