There are some perks to living in england, alough most of the time I don 't speak about them. Hopwood woods sits between mine and my best friend's house. It's place we'd go to to laugh, to cry, to find peace. To the eye of an outsider its just a woods. But me and shannon have a memory in every corner, it's our very own secret garden.
The fairy tree is sacred ground, a happy place from our younger days probably 7, 8 years old. It's a dead tree covered in moss and fungus lying acros the woodland floor dormant. It comes alive when the fairys apear, tiny little things of all different colours, wearing dresses made from materials found on the forest floor. They dont come out when humans are around, only when night falls and the people are sleeping. So we would climb the tree and walk along it pretending we could see them, searching the pealing bark for anything they left behind.
The shelter and the statue of mary is a mystery. It lives inside a huge bush, whe came across it one day, on a school trip to lady hopwoods house and decided it could be our very own secret place. Its a small concrete bunker with something that resembles a very old shrine. Broken porcaline from qiute some time ago and a statue of mary, her paint was pealing but she was still intact. We go there sometimes to hide from the rain. Or just hide in general.
The pond isn't a secret. But as we got older we would go there to get drunk and laugh at ourselves. Theres a bench situated right were the sun shines, in the summer we would sit there with alcohol and throw things into the water.
The balancing beam and the river tunnels is were we would go to be secret smokers, to sit on the beam and watch the river slide past bellow us. It's a thinking place, one thats sheltered from the world with big oak trees.
My best friend is my soulmate and we have known eachother from being 3 years old. I look forward to finding more secret and sacred places with her.
