People always tell me that I have a really good memory, and I suppose that is true. I do remember things very well. I also can remember many things from when I was very young; for example, I have numerous memories of the first house I lived in, which my family moved away from when I was less than three years old. The memories are fragmentary at most, but they are there. One of them is a memory of me standing at the front door of the house, looking out at the front steps and the yard, from behind the screen storm door. It was summer, everything was green and shady in the yard. I can even remember the feel of the screen door against my nose, which was pressed against it, as I looked out.
Our next house was one my parents had built, and it was the house I lived in and called home for the rest of my childhood and teenage years, until I became an adult. I was less than three years old when we moved into the new house in 1973 ( yes, I have dated myself now) and my older brother was four. (I also have two younger sisters, who were born later). My brother, being the only boy, had his own bedroom (I shared a room with my sisters until I was thirteen) and I used to like going into his room to hang out with him. He was my big brother and I looked up to him and when he told me one day that he had seen “elves” coming out of a hole in the ground, I totally believed him.
My brother’s single-occupied palace of a bedroom had a window that looked out at what we called the “side yard”, which was just a grassy area and a line of trees that bordered our property line on the south side of our house. We lived in a rural area, not in a city, and I believe there was an underground drainage field for the septic system in the side yard at the time because I remember a small hole or slightly sunken spot, with a narrow pipe that stuck out of the ground right next to it, which always seemed to have longer grass around it because my dad always had to steer the lawnmower around this pipe. It was this “hole” that my brother told me was where the ‘elves’ lived, and where he had seen them leaving their underground domicile.
At the time he told me this, I was about four and a half, I believe. I started kindergarten a month shy of my fifth birthday and I remember this happening the spring before I started kindergarten, when the grass was still dormant and scrubby looking from winter and the ‘hole’ was exposed more than usual and muddy. I remember standing in his room, with it’s blue and red cowboys and Indians wallpaper, looking out that window and him pointing to where he had seen the elves. He called them elves, but in my mind I pictured gnomes.
I suppose I pictured them as garden gnomes because I really had nothing else for comparison, and I had seen garden gnome statues before, at a neighbor boy’s house. (The neighbor boy was a friend and schoolmate of my brother and the house was actually an old farm that his family owned but did not live in, which is a crazy story for another time. However, suffice to say, this neighbor boy thought it was funny to sometimes pee on the garden gnomes that were hidden in the overgrown grass, which we also thought was hilarious.)
Try as I might, I could never glimpse the gnomes ( or elves) myself, no matter how long I stood at the window in my brother’s room looking at that spot in the yard, hoping they would appear. And I’m sure it was hours when you added it up, that I spent at that window, straining my eyes for any slight movement, any minute indication. I even remember several times, while playing outside, walking over to that hole in the ground and inspecting it, looking for something, wondering why my brother had seen them but I never did.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that my brother had made it all up, there were no elves or gnomes. I don’t remember how much time passed before I came to this conclusion, probably months, but I certainly never forgot about the joke and in later years, would look at that spot in the yard and laugh to myself, and think of the gullible kid that I had once been, hoping to see gnomes tumbling out of a hole in our side yard, they unaware they were being observed, occupied with their own secret business, which only I was privy to.
Want to know how the tradition of garden gnomes got started? Good thing we have this thing called “the internet!”
See link below.