Full of Secrets

I loved Sunnyside Gardens park, the wooden jungle gym that my father, an engineer, had helped design and build; the tiny two-feet-deep swimming pool; the hidden courtyards of Sunnyside Gardens that seemed full of secrets: mulberry trees dropping sweet, ripe fruit, a hutch of baby bunnies in a neighbor's yard, weeping willows and magnolias and maples. I thought the squat brick houses were beautiful, with the snow collecting in their eaves, and the giant trees arching over the street, their roots cracking up the cement sidewalks.

Still, it wasn't exactly a bucolic idyll.

—from Margo Rabb's "Love and Shame" in the upcoming anthology Forgotten Borough

Pre-order your copy of Forgotten Borough @ SUNY Press, Amazon, or other book retailers.

Above: "Sunnyside Gardens: Common Court in Spring" by Kate Anne on flickr