Royal Botanic Gardens Kew

For Christmas, Micah’s parents gave us a year membership to the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, a wonderful, 300-acre garden but a short city bus ride from Southall, where we spent many of our weekends reading or studying, or walking through the gardens. One of the most difficult thing for us, perhaps the most difficult, is the long, miserable winters of the UK. The song ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ is one which has not had too much currency in the States, but perhaps that is because one might never understand the phrase ‘bleak midwinter’ without living in the UK. This was compounded by the community we lived in- the uncollected refuse, unbroken cement, and unyielding grey skies.
Kew Gardens gave us a much-needed respite from all this, and also provided a particularly good spot for reading aloud the Harry Potter books which we read together that year.