One of the things no one tells us as we grow up is that we will be living in a world rife with ghosts — all of our disappointed hopes and our outgrown dreams, all the abandoned novels and unproven theorems, all the people we used to love, all the people we used to be. A ghost is a palpable presence of an absence charged with feeling, the contour of something half-known, half-remembered, half-forgotten — a halfway house between what we understand and what we cannot, between what we have let go and what we cannot.
Children are especially prone to perceiving ghosts because childhood itself is such a halfway house between imagination and reality, because what they know is so small against the vastness of what there is yet to know and what may never be known that they invent their own answers to the immense open question of life, answers wild and wondrous and often true.
Writer Kyo Maclear and artist Katty Maurey conjure up this primal reckoning with the unknowns of love and loss in There’s a Ghost in the Garden (public library) — the subtle and soulful story of a little boy who believes a ghost haunts his grandfather’s garden.
In the course of trying to discern the source and nature of the ghostly presence — a ghost mischievous but friendly, knocking down flower pots, leaving “little presents” in the bird nest and tracks on the path that “was once a cool, dark stream” — the boy discovers that his grandfather also had a childhood, that inside the old man lives the ghost of a long-ago boy who also had fantasies and fears, who also used to play in the flickering sunlight, who once swam in the stream that is now a dry path.
As the two converse, shadows flit across the gloaming garden — a hare, a fox, a deer, a bird — never fully revealing themselves, there and then gone, as the stars, clear and constant, rise in the night.
There is no grandmother in the picture — only a young boy and an old man talking about ghosts, about what is remembered, about the seen and the unseen.
What emerges from the story is the intimation that forgetting — those who have left us, and the parts of ourselves we have left behind — is a kind of death, but we can come back from it through memory and love, which twine the lifeline tethering us to everything that is beautiful and enduring.
Complement There’s a Ghost in the Garden with a different lens on the garden and the spirit and a different lens on the living ghost in each of us — the mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person, despite a lifetime of physical and psychological change.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova