One June evening, when the orchards were pink-blossomed again, when the frogs were singing silverly sweet in the marshes about the head of the Lake of Shining Waters, and the air was full of the savor of clover fields and balsamic fir woods, Anne was sitting by her gable window. She had been studying her lessons, but it had grown too dark to see the book, so she had fallen into wide-eyed reverie, looking out past the boughs of the Snow Queen, once more bestarred with it’s tufts of blossom. In all essential respects the little gable chamber was unchanged. The walls were as white, the pincushion as hard, the chairs as stiffly and yellowly upright as ever. Yet the whole character of the room was altered. It was full of a new vital, pulsing personality that seemed to pervade it and to be quite independent of schoolgirl books and dresses and ribbons, and even of the cracked blue jug full of apple blossoms on the table. It was as if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had taken a visible although immaterial form and had tapestried the bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine.

p. 161-162, Anne of Green Gables

{Short note to Maud -excuse me for a moment!} Oh, Lucy Maud. You just have such a way with words. And make up beautiful words, too, like silverly, yellowly…sigh. I so wish I could be your friend in real life. I know you said that your characters resemble no one in real life, but as I learn more and more about you, oh my, so much of your wonderful thoughts, love of nature, and turning from pain and choosing to focus on beauty comes through in your writing. I’m reading the first volume of your journals, gifted to me kindly by my sister, for my birthday. You know that, young Maud is very much like young Anne in many ways, right? Such a beautiful composite and interweaving of real life experiences, feelings and fiction’s glorious imaginative flights of fancy. The photos of P.E.I. in a lovely book I borrowed from the library remind me so deeply of my own trip and introduction to your beloved island. Just glorious! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting your pen to the paper and sharing pure beauty in ink. }

Chapters 19 & 20

{continuing our readings}

These two chapters were just lovely with Anne and Diana’s infamous jumping on top of Aunt Josephine in the very Sparest of Bedrooms. Of course, Anne ends up gaining a Bosom Friend from the whole ordeal. Matthew stood up to Marilla, with always humorous conversations occuring when he does.

Anne’s place names are just sooo wonderful. Dryad’s Bubble, Idlewild, The Haunted Wood, and Victoria Island, in honor of the Queen, of course.

Anne’s inattention and imagination are large factors in Matthew’s handkerchiefs being starched and a pie being burnt to a crisp. Surprise, surprise. She is moodily reflecting on the fact that she has been at Green Gables for a year.

Marilla makes Anne take a dreaded trip at TWILIGHT through the Haunted Wood to get an apron pattern from Mrs. Barry, which is just about the same as death. How could you, Marilla? 😉

Such hilarious, beautiful chapters and made all the more wonderful by simultaneously dipping into Volume 1 of L.M. Montgomery’s journals and Catherine Reed’s The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables. I highly recommend them.

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