The key...

She bent over instantly as her shoe had just kicked up a small amount of dust which then uncovered a tarnished something in the earth. It had caught her eye. She brushed the dirt to one side with her hand which revealed an old fragile key. Rusted and curled at one end rather large towards the other she picked it up carefully so as not to expose its fragility. A breath of gentle air blew against the key from her lips further revealing its coarse layers of age and rust. The key must have been many decades old and somehow lost from its lock, like a ship from the ocean........


The key ancient mesmerised her, she stared at it as she lay hold of it in a firm grasp. She pondered what secrets it held and who might have been the original keeper of the key. Had the previous owner lost the cherished secrets it secured or had they somehow now been revealed to the world from which they were hidden. Running home, desperate to find something the key could also lock and unlock her mind lay hold of all the memories and scraps of paper which had scribed keepsakes and unmentionable verse etched upon them. These would also now be hidden from the world and reserved as trinkets of sentiment, nothing demure and nothing dark, mere fantasy of a youth spent in solitude with the infrequent glimmer of a social intimacy seldom come, from children her own age.

The key... was a passage to another world, a world of mystery and hidden pleasures, a world of fantastic gesture in which her fantasies became all so tangible to her. As an only child she often confided in her diary and kept secrets too complex and detailed to share with another soul, but often childish nonsense to the rest of us!

The Key is of no consequence or value except to the beholder, for what is cherished and stored securely with lock and key is validated only by the heart ~ where secrets are locked and revealed, by the single turn of a key!