The Diary I Buried in the Backyard
Twelve years old, one tin box, and secrets I trusted only to soil.
The summer I was twelve, I stopped trusting paper to stay where I put it, so I started trusting dirt instead.
This was 1999, in a brick house on Carmine Street, the kind of neighborhood where everyone's sprinklers came on at the same hour. I had a diary with a brass lock that a hairpin could open in four seconds. I know the exact time because my little sister Nita once timed herself, out loud, for an audience of her stuffed animals.
She was ten. She read the whole thing, March through June, and then she did what ten-year-olds do with ammunition: she spent it immediately. At dinner, in front of everyone, she asked me sweetly how 'R.D.' was doing. R.D. was Ravi Deshpande, who sat two rows over in Mrs. Whitfield's class and had once lent me a pencil that I never returned on purpose. I went so red my mother put a hand on my forehead to check for fever.
That night I tore out the pages. Some I flushed, two I burned in the bathroom sink, badly, setting off no alarms but scarring the porcelain in a way I blamed on 'chemicals.' Then I lay in bed and reached a conclusion that felt very adult: human beings could not be trusted with the truth about me. Not sisters, obviously. Not mothers, who read things 'while cleaning.' What could be trusted was the backyard.
I had a Danish butter cookie tin, the blue one that every household on earth uses for sewing supplies. I emptied out the thread. Into it went a fresh diary, a pen, and a plastic bag inside a plastic bag, because even at twelve I understood about rain. I buried it eight inches down behind the guava tree, in the corner where the fence sagged, and I patted the soil flat with the back of the spade like I was tucking someone in.
For two years, that was my confessional. I would go out in the evening 'to water the plants,' kneel behind the guava tree, and dig up my own heart with a serving spoon.
I wrote about the fights my parents had with the doors shut, the ones they believed the doors could hold. I wrote about my grandfather's chair after my grandfather stopped being in it. I wrote about wanting, with a wanting that embarrassed me, to be somebody's favorite. Then I sealed the tin, buried it, and walked back inside lighter than I had walked out.
You can call it a diary. Really it was a mailbox with no address on it. Every child needs one place where the truth costs nothing.
Then fourteen happened, and high school happened, and the tin did what buried things do.
It waited.
Twenty-three years later, my mother sold the house on Carmine Street. My father was four years gone by then, and the house had too many rooms shaped like him. On the last weekend, while the movers wrapped the good dishes in newspaper, I took a garden trowel out back with the specific casualness of a woman committing a small crime.
The guava tree was enormous now. The fence still sagged in the same place, which comforted me in a way I cannot fully explain. I measured off from the fence post, because twelve-year-old me had been smart enough to count the steps, and I dug.
The trowel hit tin at eight inches, a dull clonk I felt in my teeth. I sat back on my heels in my mother's yard, thirty-five years old, dirt in the cuffs of my jeans, holding a rusted blue cookie tin like an organ that had been kept on ice for me all this time.
Inside, the plastic bags had done their work. The diary was damp-swollen but readable. And on top of it, folded into quarters, was a page of loose-leaf that I had never put there.
I know I never put it there... because it was not my handwriting.
It was Nita's.
'I found this in sixth grade,' the note said, in the round bubbly letters she had at thirteen. 'I only read one page and then I felt sick and stopped. I'm sorry about R.D. and everything. I buried mine next to yours. Don't dig it up until we're old.' And then, because she was Nita, a smiley face.
I dug to the left... nothing.
One foot to the right, the trowel clonked again.
A second tin.
Hers was a Christmas popcorn tin, red plaid, rusted at the seam, and inside was a diary with a unicorn on the cover and three years of a sister I had never met. The year she was scared of our parents' shut-door voices too, which I had assumed only I could hear. A page about reading my diary and hating herself for a whole summer. And one entry, dated October 2001, that said: 'I wish I could tell her things. She buries her secrets behind the guava tree. I checked on hers today to make sure the rain wasn't getting in.'
She had been checking on my tin. For years.
My little sister, the hairpin burglar, the spender of ammunition, had been quietly maintaining the waterproofing on my secrets like a groundskeeper who never once read the graves.
We spent our whole childhood six feet apart, telling our secrets to the same patch of ground.
I called her from the backyard, sitting in the dirt between two open holes the size of cookie tins. She picked up on the second ring. I said, 'I found your tin.'
There was a silence long enough to hold twenty-three years in it... and then Nita said, 'Is the unicorn okay? Tell me the unicorn survived.'
We read to each other for three hours. Me on the back step of a sold house, her in a parked car outside her kids' swim practice, both of us translating our twelve-year-old selves out loud. Some entries were so silly we wheezed. Some were so sad... we just went quiet and breathed at each other down the line, the way you only can with a sister. Somewhere in hour two I understood that the forgiveness had happened decades ago, underground, where neither of us could see it.
I write for a living now, or next to one, and people sometimes ask when I started. I used to say high school. The truth is I started behind a guava tree with a serving spoon, learning the first rule of the whole art: the truth needs somewhere to go, and it would rather be buried than polished. Half of what I make still comes out of that childhood, the same eight inches of it. Last year I posted a poem about the two tins on a community wall for poets, and strangers filled the replies with their own coordinates. A hollow tree in Ohio. A loose brick in Karachi. Under the third floorboard, Dublin. An entire generation of children, all of us mailing letters to no one, all of us answered anyway.
The new owners of the house on Carmine Street have young kids. Before we handed over the keys, I did not fill the holes with just soil. I put both tins back in the ground with a fresh notebook in each and a pen wrapped in two plastic bags, because even at thirty-five I understand about rain.
Whoever finds them will not know what they are.
They will know exactly what they are for.
I patted the soil flat with the back of the spade. Like tucking someone in.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.