A Non-Existent Secret (Place)

Once upon my youth, there was a grove of white pine trees than stood proudly on a hill above my grandparents' house.  The woods in which they were located had still been pastures for cows during my father's early childhood.  Once in the first few years I lived nearby, some local kids ignored the denial of permission from my elders and went camping in that grove.  A boy was burned while fiddling with their camp fire; when his parents tried to press a lawsuit, my elders' attorney immediately went after them for ignoring the firm "NO" that they'd been told when they asked permission to camp there.

After this incident and just before that family moved away, the grove gained the moniker of "the secret place."  It wasn't a well-kept secret, as every kid in our quiet rural neighborhood knew exactly where it was.  By the time I turned 11, I was the only one visiting it even occasionally, usually while taking the route through the woods to my grandparents' house.  It was quiet, peaceful, and the ground carpeted by soft brown needles shed by the trees.  (Looking back, it's a miracle the fire didn't get even more out of control!)  The grove, however, was merely the crest of a lower part of the hill.  The apex of this particular hill was a further 50-75 yards up, topped by a flat expanse of granitic gneiss, from which the construction project that became my high school alma mater (no longer standing as of this writing; the building was replaced circa 2023) was visible a mile away as the crow flies.  That rock sat at an elevation a modicum short of 875 feet above sea level.  Off to the left slightly down the hill from this expanse of naked rock was a fieldstone wall, before which my farming forebears had abandoned a horse-drawn hay rake decades earlier.

Today, the grove of white pines no longer exists; likely, it was removed at the behest of the first owner of that land not related to me (possibly due to the age of the trees, which were likely 100 years old or more when I was a child).  The hayrake likewise is long gone, as it'd now be in someone's yard.  The granite massif, far too large for any bulldozer to remove, likely remains at the rear of someone's back yard.

The secrets of the "secret place" are unknown to those who didn't live there when I did, and have long been forgotten to time.