Secret Spot

Once a year everyone on my mom's side of the family goes camping.  We rent cabins by a lake in Upstate New York and just enjoy being with each other.  There are 30-40 of us depending on the year so often during the day we split up in to little groups.  My group was always my little brother Josh and my cousin Jen, who being six months older, was the closest to my age.  One year the three of us decided to make a secret spot.  It was a little clearing in the woods between 2 of the cabins...we added more brush around the sides because the woods weren't very thick and it didn't seem secret enough.  We tried to keep it hidden and sneak away so nobody saw us going there but  I don't think we were very good at being sneaky (Yelling across the campsite, "let's go to the secret spot" kinda gives things away).

I think all kids want a secret spot.  A place where nobody watches them, where they can just be kids. There's something cool and daring about having a secret spot.  In Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia, Leslie understood this.  "You know what we need?  We need a place just for us.  It would be so secret that we would never tell anyone in the whole world about it." So Leslie and Jess made their very own secret spot and they called it Terabithia. In Terabithia Leslie and Jess were Queen and King and had all kinds of amazing adventures.  Leslie tells Jess all kinds of stories from Shakespeare to mythology and Jess becomes Leslie's only true friend.

Of course spending all this time together there are bound to be rumors.  Have you ever been in a small town and tried to sneak away with a person of the opposite gender-even with no thoughts of romance-yeah, people talk.  So it comes as no surprise that people started saying Leslie was Jess' girlfriend.  Jess knew better, "He knew that a girlfriend was someone who chased you on the playground and tried to grab you and kiss you." Leslie would never do such a thing.

But all books can't be secret places, imagination, and wonder.  Tragedy strikes Terabithia but to talk more about that would mean I give away the ending and I can't let that happen.

Taking on the world in your secret spot...that's kids stuff. 


PS This is another book that became a movie recently but I have not seen the film.  Any thoughts?