No Need to Whisper

Feeling like a wilted lettuce leaf, tired, tasteless and discolored around the edges, I tumbled into bed while it was still light. Summer in the south can be a grim season and there's no relief in sight. The heat is like an ocean wave, overpowering and relentless and for the 100th time I think of Nova Scotia in August - brilliant sun and blue ocean, green fields and salt water breezes along rocky coastlines - there's no place like a childhood home.

Uncle Len had added my playhouse onto the garage when I was about five. He had made a small table and two ladderback chairs, a cradle, and a tall, skinny bookcase for the inside. Nana had made curtains for the windows and helped me with furnishings - one scarred table lamp, a red checked oilskin tablecloth, several boxes of old magazines and paperbacks and an oddly put together collection of dishes and utensils. My daddy contributed a tinny, battery powered radio, a new spiral notebook and a glass jar of sharpened yellow pencils. Even my mother donated a set of blue plastic glasses she'd found on sale at McIntyre's and a small travel alarm clock with a broken ringer. On Ruthie's first visit, she brought a treasure - a dark blue, shiny satin pillow with red fringe and the words Home Sweet Home, Digby, N.S. emblazoned on the front - she had traded a scratchy old 45 of "A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation" for it, a considerable sacrifice for a little girl with a huge crush on Marty Robbins.

Here we held our afternoon teas, listened to the Red Sox games, entertained the Queen, cut and pasted magazine pictures into oversized scrapbooks. Nana would bring us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with cold milk and cookies, knocking politely on the door and announcing that lunch was being served. We drank pretend wine and imagined pretend cocktail parties with famous singing stars - Marty Robbins with Brenda Lee on his arm always the first to arrive and the last to leave - and we dressed the complacent dogs in Ruthie's doll clothes and then laughed ourselves silly. There was never any need to whisper or hide in the playhouse and there was nothing to fear there, it was a child's place, not much larger than a walk in closet, but secure. Uncle Len, who happened to be Ruthie's

grandfather, had worked to make it so.

Sadly, childhood doesn't last forever and one summer we outgrew the playhouse and the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Ruthie had developed a feverish crush on one of the Haynes boys and a new passion for playing Spin the Bottle replaced even Marty Robbins - my grandmother began keeping a closer eye on us both, not fully trusting the preteen years and the island boys, even the well mannered ones, to be a sensible combination. The playhouse was abandoned and turned dusty with disuse, finally becoming a refuge for mice and a nest of bees. One day, after a pack of cigarettes had gone mysteriously missing, Nana bought a shiny new padlock and locked it up.

It would, at the same time, please and upset me if after the house I had been raised in finally changed hands, a new little girl had discovered the playhouse and made it her own.