The honest to goodness, oh-so-real, Bougainvillea Hideaway.

When I was seven my family moved to Hawaii. (I lived there until I was nine.)The place was somewhat like heaven to me. I had just come from a country where snow covered the ground and accumulated from late November until sometime in the middle of April. But this was a place that was 70 degrees in the winter. This was a place where you could run around with no shoes, and make every tree your secret fort--if your mother or her friends didn't catch you.

I used to love to wander all over the neighborhood where I lived. Sometimes I'd roam with friends, more often I'd travel alone. I wanted to explore every little niche and nook of my surroundings.

There was a particular pathway, darkened by many trees, behind the row of houses where I lived. I used to like to run down the path and climb to the top of one of my favorite trees. But not everyday. If I ran just a little further down that walkway, I'd reach the end of the houses, the end of the green darkness, and come out standing near a section of grass and two humongous bougainvillea bushes (like the ones in the picture).

I had discovered that if you walked around to the side not facing the walkway, there was an opening big enough for a kid to crawl into. There were thorns on the outer wall of flowers and leaves, so I had to be careful when skooshing in and out, but it was well worth the occasional scratch. The inside was a big hollow area where you could sit in comfort wihout anyone knowing where you were. I showed some of my friends this little hideaway, and we'd sometimes have club meetings.

Then there were the other bougainvillea bushes back down at the opposite end of the pathway, before you reached our row of houses, and a few feet shy of a highway, that had a more ominous story attached to them. The neighborhood kids posited that someone had been killed in the hollow of one of these bushes. And it really looked like that was just what had happened--to us kids. There were two or three huge rocks, each over a a foot long, as well as wide, inside one of these bushes. One of the rocks had a bunch of red paint splattered on it. That was scary stuff.