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The Story of My Life

by Helen Keller

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In The Story of My Life, why is the old-fashioned garden Helen's childhood paradise?

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Helen Keller's childhood garden was her paradise because it provided a sanctuary where she could engage her remaining senses of touch and smell, despite being blind and deaf. The garden allowed her to explore nature's wonders, offering peace and a way to connect with the world. The scents of flowers and the feel of plants brought her joy and comfort, and this sensory engagement foreshadowed her later breakthroughs in communication with her teacher, Anne Sullivan.

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Helen Keller enjoyed playing in the garden as a young child because she could enjoy it with the senses other than hearing and seeing.

From a very young age, Helen Keller loved nature.  She describes how she used to spend her days playing in the garden before her teacher Anne Sullivan came and taught her how to communicate with the world.  She did not need to have all of her senses to enjoy the garden.

Even in the days before my teacher came, I used to feel along the square stiff boxwood hedges, and, guided by the sense of smell, would find the first violets and lilies. (Ch. 1)

The wonder of nature is that you can experience it even without being about to see or hear.  You can still smell the flowers, touch the grass, and taste the air or the fruits.  Helen had a somewhat unhappy life because...

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she had such trouble communicating, so the garden was her sanctuary.  She often went there when she was frustrated.

What joy it was to lose myself in that garden of flowers, to wander happily from spot to spot, until, coming suddenly upon a beautiful vine, I recognized it by its leaves and blossoms, and knew it was the vine which covered the tumble-down summer-house at the farther end of the garden! (Ch. 1)

When Anne Sullivan came, she told Helen the names of the things that she so enjoyed experiencing.  This just broadened Helen’s experience.  Helen still loved nature, and they would go outside for the lessons most of the time.  In fact, Helen’s first word was “water.”  Nature was a good teacher because it was so sensory.  Anne could teach Helen the word for something by having her feel it and then showing her the word by spelling the signs for the letters into her hands.

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Why does Helen consider the old-fashioned garden her childhood paradise?

From her early years, Keller, as she describes in her memoir, had a love of nature. Being blind and deaf, she enjoyed going into the garden near her house, Ivy Green, because she liked the scents of the flowers and the boxwood hedges. She says it was a "joy" to go from place to place in the garden until she found a particular vine that meant she had arrived at the summer house at the garden's far end. This suggests that the garden was a place of mystery and wonder to her—she wasn't quite sure where she was at any given time, and she had to rely on her senses of smell and touch to guide her.

She writes of loving the clematis, jessamine, and butterfly lilies, but especially the climbing roses. She says she has never, in northern greenhouses, found roses like those that bloomed at her childhood home, describing them as

filling the whole air with their fragrance, untainted by any earthy smell; and in the early morning, washed in the dew, they felt so soft, so pure, I could not help wondering if they did not resemble the asphodels of God's garden.

It must have been a pleasure to escape a domestic world, where it was difficult for her to communicate, and enter into a place where she could feel free and experience the beauty of nature.

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Helen inherits her father's love for gardens. And for her, the garden near her home becomes a haven from a dark and troubled world. Spending time among all those flowers with their soft, smooth textures and their delicate fragrances allows Helen to develop two of her remaining senses. The garden becomes a true paradise for Helen, a sanctuary of peace and repose where she can engage with the outside world in a way that simply isn't possible elsewhere. The delights of the garden crucially foreshadow an event of great significance in Helen's life. The connection she establishes with the world around her in the garden is developed further when Annie teaches her the rudiments of language during that extraordinary day at the water-pump.

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