The Secret Garden

 The silver key perched between my fingers. I took a deep breath and unlocked the gate. It was once a beautiful white painted gate but now most of the paint had flaked off and the wood was splintering and decaying. I remembered Grandpa and my brother painting it and Ruby- our old red setter- not being extremely helpful and kept trying to drink the paint. She ended up with a white moustache!

As the gate swung open and then shut behind me, I gazed around at my surroundings, it was even more beautiful than I remembered it being...

Vibrant yellow, pink and white flowers lined the dew sprinkled grass that was luscious and green. Apricot rose bushes bloomed each side of the gate. They grew, untamed and wildly out at all angles, seemingly having escaped from the neat, budding spheres that Grandpa trimmed them into all those years ago. 

I carried on through the garden, taking in all the beautiful wildlife making this place its home. A Kingfisher sat elegantly in a towering tree, it had a large, pointy beak and shiny orange and blue feathers. Then it gracefully spread its wings and glided off. I instinctively followed, which lead me to the bottom of the garden - the place where my childhood memories here come flooding back like a waterfall of wonder...

 A river sparkled and glistened in the beaming sunlight with a willow tree draped over it, standing tall and mighty above me. It gently swayed as my eyes flickered to a patch of ground. This patch of ground, where three children and a dog once played, and where an old man once sat in his deckchair with his fishing rod - smiling and laughing at his grandchildren. 

With a glint in his eye, he would tell me: "Good things take time, much like fishing, if you wait patiently and quietly, Mother Nature will soon reward you."  About a second later, a huge fish dived out of the water and I thought it must have been Mother Nature rewarding Grandpa with her magic.              

I just knew that she would have let his spirit live on here for evermore...