Christmas in Mariposa by Jamie Lamb

Author:Jamie Lamb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

The Secret Garden

* * *

THE HOUSE NEXT to our house was the Richardsons’, or at least it was where the Richardson house used to be. Mr. Richardson had spared no expense to build an immaculate red-brick rancher with a back lawn that descended in manicured stages to a concrete seawall.

The Richardsons were retired when they built the house and they built it to last. Everything was high quality, high density, and the glass—from louvred windows to picture window—was custom crafted. I can remember being very small and messing around the foundations as it was built, so it’s odd to find that the Richardson house is gone now, torn down—presumably using jackhammers—and replaced by a remarkably charmless two-storey house. The only good news is that the little boathouse Mr. Richardson built is still perched down on the seawall. It too had been constructed out of brick and concrete and built to endure. Mr. Richardson had installed a marine railway and, one summer’s day, a trim twenty-four-foot Owens cabin cruiser idled up to the railway crib and was pulled up into the boathouse.

One week later, Mr. Richardson let the cruiser down the slipway into the water and assisted Mrs. Richardson aboard from the dock. They took the cruiser for a little spin up and down the waterfront before returning it to its cradle, pulling it up into the boathouse, and never venturing out in it again. Boating wasn’t the Richardsons’ thing, but their boathouse was a wonder to a kid who could squeeze under its retractable door. The inside was spotless, like an operating theatre. There were new fishing poles and paddles and life jackets hung perfectly along its painted walls, unsullied by human hands, the cabin cruiser pristine and dry as a cactus carving. When I left for university, the boathouse still smelled new.

If the Richardson house being torn down was disconcerting, it was nothing compared with the next two houses on the waterfront. Both are contemporary, well kept, and completely foreign to me. It requires a concentrated act of memory to wipe away these houses and their manicured lawns and summon up the single shaggy property that used to occupy this section of the street.

It belonged to someone called Ferguson. I never met him, her, or them, and never saw anyone connected with the place, but to the neighbourhood it was always Fergusons’.

The public view of the Ferguson property used to be a tall green wooden fence that blocked the view from Bay Street as well as from the North Street extension that ran to the water’s edge and bounded it on its south side. These views were further masked by overhanging maple and elm boughs. The north side of the property was hidden behind a twenty-foot-high hedge shared with the Richardson property.

The only break in the fenced façade was an old wooden garage with peeling white paint that was set into the fence along Bay Street, its garage door padlocked. There were no gates or entrances to the property of any kind.

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