Anne Montgomery

Of all the spots we visited on our twenty-three day tour of Northeastern Canada and Maine, I most looked forward to discovering the spot where the Green Gables books were set. I have owned all eight of the series since I was a child and must have read them twenty-five times over the past fifty years, although I can’t explain why. Anne talks entirely too much, and I am impatient with her inability to see Gilbert’s qualities, or to return his love. Just what is it about these books that so appeals to me, and can my visit possibly live up to such expectation? Perhaps it is Montgomery’s island world that I find so memorable: her descriptions of woods, and shores, and red roads, and lighthouses. Even though I know Anne is a character drawn from Montgomery’s imagination, I find it hard to accept that she isn’t a real person, still living today just outside of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island. We spend two days on the Island, as the locals call it. It is October and the leaves have begun to shine in brilliant yellows and oranges and reds. On cloudy mornings, each translucent leaf seems to glow, and I smile as the old rhyme, One misty, moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather, comes to mind and I recall Mother repeating it to me on cloudy days. I find the rolling farmlands, the brilliantly-colored

On early winter mornings she’d say – In winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candlelight. When it rained – The rain is raining all around, it falls on field and tree. It falls on the umbrellas here, and on the ships at sea. And on windy nights – Whenever the moon and stars are set, whenever the wind is high, all night long in the dark and wet, a man goes riding by. These bits of Mother’s poetry seem to fit my life again as I brace for the brisk, wet, windy Prince Edward Island