My Acquaintance with Anne

I woke up this morning knowing exactly what I was going to write about. Then a friend sent me this article and I decided I would like to shift my focus to include some thoughts from that article along with what I was going to write about anyway. And somehow, right now, all I want to write about is the fact that my feet are not going to survive Kevin's childhood. She loves to drop things on my feet and tickle them and pinch them and anything she can do to torture them. She is now grounded from wearing shoes in the apartment because most of the time she ends up stepping on my toes or over my feet and considering she is a solid <at least 25lbs> child--it HURTS! This is a big deal because she loves her shoes dearly and wants to wear them all the time and I want her to be happy..but (excuse the pun) I am putting my foot down---because if I don't put it down, I may not have any feet left to stand on at her wedding reception. 

Now that my rant is over, let me get back to what I originally wanted to write about today, and that is this girl:



Do you know her?

Um, because if you don't, you should.

Now, I know many of you know Anne of Megan Follows via the PBS movies (beautiful, wonderful, blessed films that I adore), but that is not exactly the Anne that I am talking about.

The Anne I am talking about is the Anne of L.M. Montgomery's imagination--the one that graces the pages of eight different books in her very own series, the same said series that has had me distracted and otherwise annoyed my husband all week because every day he comes home from work and I have a different-colored Anne book in my hand and the house is messier than he left it that morning.

Sometimes, fiction can drift into reality for me and I just get a little lost. It's been one of those weeks.

I have wanted these books to be part of my personal library since the first time I read them, in the guest bedroom of my Aunt Luci's home the summer I turned 15 and nannied for her two girls for three weeks. I have read the series probably two or three times since then, and each time I have a new favorite book. It seems Anne has grown up with me--or rather, I have grown up with her. The last time I read them I was stuck at home for the summer in between college years and I fell in love with Gilbert with Anne. I wanted to reread the parts with him in them over and over again--and I did. But somehow by the time I got to the fifth and sixth and seventh books my interest petered out. Anne married? It took all the fun out of her romance with Gilbert. It ended the magic, surely. I stopped reading.

My parents gave me the entire series for my birthday at the end of July. This was my face; yes, I was that excited (but not as excited as I was when I saw my Molly and Emily dolls, as I often have to remind my husband).

It took a few weeks for life to settle down and for me to pick up the books again. This time, I breezed through the first four books, enjoying the stories, underlining brilliant passages here and there, like on page 276 of Anne of Avonlea when Anne realizes that "Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one's life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down. Perhaps it crept to one's side like an old friend through quiet ways....perhaps, perhaps...love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath."  Oh, if there were ever a quote to describe the way love crept into my life, well, this would be it!

So, you see, Anne and I are kindred spirits.

*Spoiler Alert*

This time, having realized that romance doesn't end with marriage but rather begins with it, my heart thrilled as I read book five, Anne's House of Dreams. Anne and Gilbert are finally married, and those first few years of their marriage (newlywed years behind me also) reminded me of my own in ways. I cried with Anne when her first baby was born and died unexpectedly. I know the pain of a birth that wasn't quite what you expected--and perhaps, without the benefit of a century of medicinal advances, my "wee white lady" would have ended up in a grave just as Anne's baby did. And as Anne faces the adventure of finding a home to raise her children in (note: we are getting a house! I hope! soon!) and my heart stirred as the chapters spoke of the mantle of motherhood settling on Anne's shoulders. I wear it now, too.

But the scene that screamed at me, the one that I hadn't realized a woman at the beginning of the 1900s could have experienced, came at the end of book six, Anne of Ingleside, where Anne, a college graduate, is a mother of six with an overworked, tired husband. On their 15th wedding anniversary (I loved realizing that Anne and Gilbert were married in September, just like me and my sweetheart), they are invited to dinner where Gilbert's old college flame Christine is also in attendance (funny enough, my husband's high school flame has a similar name).

Prior to the dinner, Anne worries that Gilbert will see Christine and regret that he married her instead (as if such a thing would EVER cross Gilbert's mind! Silly, silly Anne). At the dinner, however, Anne is faced with a situation that mothers today struggle with more than ever: why waste such an education on being a stay-at-home mom? (Funny enough, the article sent to me this morning talked about this exact topic!)

Let me quote a bit of text for you for a moment...

"They tell me you have seven children," said Christine, speaking to Anne but looking at Gilbert. 

"Only six living," said Anne, wincing. Even yet she could never think of little white Joyce without pain.

"What a family!" said Christine.

Suddenly it seemed a disgraceful and absurd thing to have a large family.

"You, I think, have none," said Anne.

"I never cared for children, you know." Christine shrugged her remarkably fine shoulders but her voice was a little hard. "I'm afraid I'm not the maternal type. I really never thought that it was a woman's sole mission to bring children into an already overcrowded world." 

and a few paragraphs later...as Christine is despairing that a common acquaintance could really be happy married to a poor minister and living in a downtrodden fishing village...

"Do you know what she said?" Christine threw out her beringed hands expressively. 

"Perhaps what I would say of Glen St. Mary," said Anne. "That it was the only place in the world to live in."

"Fancy you being contented there," smiled Christine. "Do you really never feel that you want a broader life?  You used to be quite ambitious, if I remember right. Didn't you write some rather clever little things when you were at Redmond [College]? A bit fantastic and whimsical of course, but still....and you've quite given it up?"

"Not altogether...but I'm writing living epistles now," said Anne, thinking of Jem and Co.

Oh, oh, oh! Isn't this exactly what I would say? Isn't this exactly how I would feel--do feel? The education I received is NOT wasted! Those four and a half years, those stories written in various computer labs across campus, a few publications with my byline, those writing classes, those literature classes, those interactions with classmates and the community, those professors that looked at me and said, "she has potential!" All of that, what is it for?

It is for her.

And moments like this.

Have I given it up?

Not altogether! No way!

I'm writing living epistles now, thought Marinda, thinking of Kevin and Co.