Memories, they say, come to be viewed through the rose-tinted lenses of Nostalgia... true, perhaps, for the brain is not a perfect storage device, and as computer files may become corrupt, so too do memories.  We filter out negative aspects to create an Elysium to which we may never return—for never was it extant.

When I was a little girl, age only five years or thereabouts, and lived near Rochester, NY, my parents took my brother and me to a historic property located about forty-five minutes from our house—Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion, an estate-like property containing ornamental gardens and a great mansion, which sported a round tower with dignity.  The day was sunny... I know that well, by the photos in our old album... and I wore a pale sunbonnet, and our party was plagued by a host of inquisitive gnats.  Of the mansion, I could later recall little but the tower; besides that, I recollected a dark, cavernous interior, rather desolate of furniture; and a plush barrier cord of crimson velvet, such as one might find at a museum—a singular detail to recall, significant to the memory for the very fact of that singularity.  For the gardens, I remembered only green, a vast quantity of green, some formed into walls that reached above my own small height, and a few spurts of white, consisting of marble statues.

Last summer, we called on Sonnenberg again, during a visit to the area in which we used to live, and in weeks before I anticipated the trip with eagerness, because I am partial to Victorian and Edwardian upper-class houses, apparel, and the like.  Too, Mom had heard that the mansion was much better furnished than it had been previously, and more rooms were open to the public, which was all the more exciting.  But the question—that tricksome question—would the place be as wonderful as memory and Mom suggested that it ought to be?

Because my brother and I both have an affinity for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mom decided that the four of us (herself, Daddy, my brother, and me) would take a Victorian-styled picnic for our lunch before venturing through the house and gardens, and so upon arrival we arrayed our repast upon a picnic table at the foot of the property, near a decidedly unromantic parking lot.  The fare was an interesting assortment of three types of sandwiches, these being sharpish-tasting watercress on homemade bread, mellowed by the addition of butter and salt; pimento and cheese filling on the same bread; and cream cheese on homemade banana bread, all accompanied by sweet black cherries, nuts, and a cream cake so dense that it was almost like fudge.  A properly auspicious beginning, I considered, to our excursion.

But—“Oh, dismay!” cried my poor hopes, when I observed that the grass, so lush and green and supple in our photographs, was parched to olive-brown, and stiff to the touch, so that what ought to have been a sweeping hillside lawn bore a closer resemblance to a desert patch.  I found this exceedingly concerning, for what faded aspect must the gardens present, if such was the state of the grass?  The wonder of the visit must surely be obliterated by this drought.

Howsoever, such a view would not do at all for a summer holiday, so on we went, climbing up the lawn until we came to the Japanese garden, where, if my hopes were not fully fulfilled, nor was my dread, the garden being still a pretty landscape of little rolling hills and quaint stone paths among them, with bridges leading over minute streams fed by a Lilliputian waterfall.  What a delicious tangle of plants beside the pond—what daring fun to cross a bridge that had no handrails!  Nay, banish disappointment! and forge onward!  Perhaps the formal Italian gardens might be a bit crispy, the fountain not as full as it ought to be, but only pause on the long, covered terrace, feel the smooth, rusty tiles underfoot, and wonder... who had danced there?  who walked there with a troubling letter in her hand?  From the Italian to the sub-rosa garden... who had crept there, into its hedged seclusion, to scribble what fairytales in the tacit company of the ivory statuary?

This was the vein in which my thoughts ran as I wandered through the winding paths.

At length, by way of a sheltered flower garden, we reached the mansion, a stately but comfortable building of vast proportion, which in due course we entered.  The entry, fitted in dark wood and tile, gave onto a lofty hall from which one could access the dining room and the drawing room.  All was decorated in good taste, all elegant, rather than imposing, from dining room to drawing room to library—ah yes, the library, with its walls of golden brown above the bookcases that housed so many old novels as to make me quite jealous!  Though overlooking the formal Italian garden, it was not uncomfortably formal in itself, and I could imagine it inhabited... perhaps a young boy would run in to steal Penrod from the shelf, and carry it off to be read precisely where he shouldn’t be, at all; or perhaps an elderly lady would sit at the desk to pen a note in fluid script, glancing out over the spread of lawns from time to time as she contemplated her next words.

Departing from the library, we mounted the broad stair to ascend to the second floor, which was open to the hall below, divided from the empty space of air by a perilously low handrail—imagine someone in a party gown, looking out over a crowd below before she stepped downstairs to join them....  But I could not then permit myself to slip into a fantasy of the past; I must remain in the present, and stroll with my parents and brother through the fine bedrooms.  Here again, Imagination assumed her throne, as I made my way through a room papered in vines of blue with yellow flowers, a room with a window seat nook and two twin beds... where perhaps two girl-cousins might have sat, whispering to one another in delight.  Hear them—

“Do you suppose Aunt will host a charity ball for the Red Cross?”

“Oh, what fun!  Say, wouldn’t Chinese lanterns along the terrace be so gay and pretty!  One could almost forget it was all for the war.  The war... I wonder if we’ll join it.”

I smiled to myself as I spun my little story, and maybe I sighed a little when I left the room, and again upon exiting the house in general, leaving behind those ghosts of my own creation.  Glad was I, however, that the fantasy was not yet done: there remained the rock garden to be explored.

The rock garden was equal in my favor to the Japanese garden, which is to say that they two shared laurels as favorites.  Its limestone grotto, subterranean and hushed, recommended itself to me as a marvelous spot for secrets, while its narrow, mossy stairways of rock enchanted me.  Here, in this shaded, earthy realm of leaf litter and ferns, I forgot the unhappy drought (except when looking at a trickle which would otherwise have been a small cataract).  Disappointment?  Had I considered myself disappointed?  Pah!

“What a glorious day,” said I to myself as I surmounted the stone summer house that stood guard over the grotto, “and wasn’t it silly to think that all would be spoiled by brown grass?”

In the moment, I thought no further, only caring to enjoy my brief voyage through the lap of luxury.  However, in remembering that day, I find a moral apparent: that memory may lead us to form grander visions than we ought, and Nature thwarts our perfect pleasure when she will—but our hopes may be salvaged through the maintenance of an outlook ready to see what is fine, beyond the manifest disappointment.