Imagine yourself small
This summer my daughter and I read ‘The Borrowers’, a series of books by Mary Norton. They follow the life of young Arrietty Clock and her parents, a family of tiny people — ‘borrowers’ they’re called, because they rely on borrowing everything they need from humans—who live under the kitchen floorboards in an old manor house.
My daughter’s play centres around creating miniature homes and streets out of any and all small things (and imagining the lives of the little people who inhabit them) and she loved these books. So did I.
What I loved was the complete upheaval of the known; how it interrupted the scale of things. As the reader I was the tiny inhabitant, and everything normal became huge and strange. Things that I only ever look at from the outside (and often down at, literally) I saw from inside. Through Arrietty’s eyes I found myself looking UP into things.
“Grasshoppers would alight like prehistoric birds on the grasses above her head; strange, armour-plated creatures, but utterly harmless to such as she. The grass stems would sway wildly beneath their sudden weight, and Arrietty, lying watchful below, would note the machine-like slicing of the mandibles as the grasshopper munched its fill.
Bees, to Arrietty, were as big as birds are to humans; and if honey-bees were pigeon-sized, a bumble-bee in weight and girth could be compared to a turkey.”
When I read this passage in ‘Borrowers Afield’, I was a small child again. In the back garden, being dwarfed by the plants on either side of the path. Towering green, and the feel of the rough pebbly concrete steps.
A neighbour’s garden. The house seemingly abandoned, the garden overgrown, plants arching, swaying high above my head. I was following my sister and I don’t know why we were there. In my memory, a witch lived there.
At age five, climbing a bank above the school playground and crouching amongst the overgrown weeds, feeling safer there, away from the concrete and noise.
Nana and Pop’s garden, crawling around under the apple trees, and along the high trellis with the grape vine weighing it down.
When we moved here I wanted to widen the garden beds. I wanted to be able to get inside them, to wind paths through them. I wanted to be inside the garden. I wanted to be part of it. I didn’t want to stand on the outside looking at it.
The labyrinth and wild circles were ways to ‘wild’ the garden. To let more grow, create more habitat for insects, feed more birds. But they unexpectedly became ways to be inside the garden. Walking between the wild circles is like being in a meadow. The lawn plants have grown all out of scale.
The labyrinth is all about being in it. From the outside right now, in its late summer state, its just a big shaggy circular patch. But from the inside it is alive. You can’t skirt anything. You are invited to inspect, up close, everything that lives on that patch of land.
I can be Arrietty in this let-go garden. Grass that used to tickle my toes now waves at waist height. I imagine chaffinch as bumblebee, sparrows as flies, the hawk becomes a dragonfly. I imagine everything big, and myself very small.
“There was no end to Arrietty’s amusements out of doors. She would climb down the bank, across the ditch, and into the long grass, and stretched between the stems would lie there watching.”