The Someday Garden

Lilymoor

There was once a house on the cliffs that grew the most beautiful flowers.

It grew peonies, daisies, sunflowers, marigolds—wild and colorful and lush, while honeysuckles climbed their way over the high walls, and roses held court in secret alcoves.

The house itself was drafty and charming, the way old and storied places were, a jumble of scalloped eaves and repurposed shipyard lumber, bone white and moss green and gray, often dressed in a cloak of midmorning fog.

The house had outlasted two of its owners, refusing to be tamed, though there was something special about its third—and current—owners that gave it pause.

It was in the way the couple held hands as they strolled through the gardens in the evenings, and the way they tended to its overgrown flower beds with the patient sort of reverence reserved only for wild things.

The house watched as its new owners celebrated occasions, and mourned losses that bit all the way to the bone, and decided that if they couldn’t have their own, they’d make a family a different way.

So they paved the driveway up to the house and dug a parking lot against the cliffs, and gently placed paths through its sections, putting order to its seasons.

Then they placed a beautifully carved piece of driftwood on its door with a word painted in lovely looping letters—a magical name for a magical house by the sea.

Lilymoor

And of all the gardens in the world, it was here where I fell in love.