Do you remember a place that had you yearn for something magical to happen?
A door in the forest, or a secret passage in the mountains? A place that made you believe for a second that witches used it as their refuge from this cruel reality?
Just a place that made your mind wonder for a second and had your thoughts lose hold?
The place I am showing you today is one I found when I was very young.
I must have been ten years old. Almost old enough to stop believing in anything magical.
I was playing outside with friends in the only place I so far had ever called home, and I was in the need for magic very much.
Just a little spark of hope, a little something that would usually seem impossible!
I was living in Hamburg at that time, but far away from the center of the city in a small place called Steilshoop. It was a place built in the second half of the 20th century, with a lot of modern buildings, and a lot of green backyards freely accessible.
These backyards were truly wonderful places for children. We would give each little cave, each little collection of trees and bushes a name and they would take part in the adventures we made up while outside. We were the generation that still dreamed of receiving a Hogwarts letter, and at least for me that wish shaped my view on these places.
If I found a doorway into the magical world, I would not have to move away with my parents. I could just leave and attend the magical school together with all my friends I would lose if we moved. Of course, I considered them magical enough as well, and so I was dreaming half seriously of finding such a pathway.
My parents wanted to move away, because these modern built places have a bad reputation in Germany. The stereotype about these places is that there are only unemployed or other poor people living there, although if you look at the population that is actually not true. Just as the criminal statistic show that there is much less crime than in other places. This is not the bad neighborhood you know from American movies. It‘s just a stigmatized place compared to elegant old buildings in the city centers or suburbs with family-owned houses.
Nevertheless, it looked like we had to move, and I was very sad about it.
The last weeks I spent in Steilshoop I used a lot to play outside with my friends. We wrote ourselves little magical time tables that we wished to replace the ones we used in school and crafted wands from branches of trees, while listening to Avril Lavigne‘s second album. It was a peaceful but very sad time.
When we found that stone in the middle of those bushes, we wondered how we had never come across it before.
Today, I think I remember that construction works had kept us away from that backyard for a long while.
It had caught our attention and seemed so very special! When the sun was sparkling in the trees around, it looked as if it was just ready to swing aside and lead somewhere completely new.
My friend Eileen and I were thinking about what to do with it. I still hear her voice joking around about just finding the right word to make it swing aside.
And there we had spent the afternoon, trying to make this magical stone move.
Maybe this sounds crazy, but we were 10 years old and it was not completely serious.
It was somewhere in the childish gray zone between play and reality that is a wonderful place to find refuge in, while you still can.
Of course the stone never moved.
The school year ended in summer.
Boxes were packed.
I came back one last time before leaving.
That time, without any friend around.
It was in the evening. I had been sneaking out, for the first and only time ever. With me I had a chain my grandmother had given to me for last Christmas. It was made of gold with a red stone as a pendant. I had it with me, because it looked magical to me and because I loved my Grandmother very much and thought how happy she would be for me if the stone actually moved.
I also had taken my phone, which was a very old and unbreakable Nokia phone I had only gotten for emergencies.
If the stone moved, I would have to tell Eileen, I thought.
And so I stood there alone in the dark of a summer night in June.
Holding the pendant my Grandmother had given to me in front of the magical stone.
Searching for words in my head.
All my thoughts pleading for something to happen.
For an escape route.
I did not want to leave.
I did not want this chapter of my life to end just yet.
This was my home.
Of course, nothing happened and I had to carefully hurry back home.
I also had to move away a few days later, and was very bothered and confused by all of our belongings fitting into one truck.
It was only many years later that I remembered the stone.
Actually, I had moved back into the same neighborhood alone with my mother only about a year later, since living in a better part of the city had not saved the marriage of my parents and we were both homesick.
But the stone, I only found again years later.
So much later that the memory of hoping for something to happen here would make me blush and feel embarrassed.
But still, I returned and played through my childhood dream here one more time.
This place still holds a certain kind of magic for me, even years later.
Do you have a place like this?
Mistress witch writes 