When I was nine years old my mother bought me the Anne of Green Gables bookset. She was excited over the idea that I read it, although she had never read it herself. I suspect she thought it would be nice to get me involved with the classics. I picked up the first book and read a few pages...dull...boring. I put it down.
Over the next few months I remember picking up the book and starring at the girl with freckles and long red braids and thinking how utterly happy she looked - cheesy even. Not my kind of book. Too many words. When I was five I had furiously fought against reading and although it was four years later, a book of an entire 307 pages seemed like an eternity. I shook my head, I would likely never come to understand why the red-headed girl was so happy.
Sometime later I picked up the book and started reading. Before I knew it I was half-way through the book, laughing over the most common of bonds - school, friendships, crushes. This was my world, but in a most softer calmer tone. It was wholesome and told of days when women wore aprons and girls had braids in their hair and had to wear hats to "keep their complexion", something I surmised must have been their skin-color. The world of Anne opened up wide for me, embracing me in the arms of a childhood that no longer existed. I was homeschooled in fear of government propaganda and potential kidnapping. My family was paranoid the end of the world was coming, but somehow in this lovely world the people had no fears like that. They worried over things like their hens not laying or their harvest not being gathered. They were afraid the heathen would die unchristian and had things like collection boxes and foreign missions to Africa.
I came to love Anne in the way she wanted to be loved, for her childhood naivety and her simple love of beauty. Some have told me Anne of Green Gables was a romance, I laugh at that. Anne is a true painting of an entire world that doesn't exist. The books were never solely about Anne...no...no...no, they were about Marilla and her lack of forgiveness, they were about Matthew and his love of solitude, they were about Rachel Lynde and her never-forgotten gossip-lust. They were about a million other characters, men and women, and their simple natures, their loves and losts, their hates and quarrels, and about a world without TV and Ipods, but also without murder, rape, mutilations and all the other fears that plague us daily.
Over the years, I did become obsessed with Maud. To this day, those who aren't kindred spirits have still laughed when I tell them my favorite author is Maud, but they are not part of "the race that knows Joseph". They don't know what Miss Cornelia did after Marshall Elliott cut his hair, or have dreamed of what the long hair of haunting Leslie Moore looked like. They have never laughed over the funny thought of Gog and Magog flanking the dearest of fireplaces, nor have they thought of Little Nan Blythe crying over the thought that her mother isn't her mother.
Then, they never cried when Matthew died or refused to give up hope when Little Jem went missing. They never heard the Piper's call or imagine Walter following it. They never dreamed of the small frog the Japanese Prince gave to Emily or what would have happened if Emily and Teddy had never picked stars together.
Maud's books are romantic, poetic, tragic, dramatic, sweet, sarcastic, but most of all I think of them as
real. Her characters lived and breathed somewhere and she understood the human spirit more than any other writer. I don't believe in love at first sight, but Peter Penhallow and Donna Dark certainly did. I haven't lived in a lighthouse but I feel as though I've looked out across the sea waiting for Lost Margaret like Captain Jim. I remember Marigold, terrified of great-grandmother, but obediently using her name - Edith.
Her stories aren't all love stories. Nothing brings me the aching yearning to just wander the shores and forests of nature like reading a Maud book. Maud isn't a romance - she's a love story - love of life and happiness and LIVING. What more would Valancy, who understood better than any of us, tell us about life? "Live every day to the fullest and wait for that bend in the road." That was what Maud wrote about. If I could design heaven it would be the inside of a Maud book.
