Light and Shadows

In the long ago days of my childhood there was an alcove near the altar that served as the library for our little Baptist Church. On one Sunday morning I found myself there, glancing at the titles which were lined up neatly on a lonely bookshelf. The room appeared or rather seemed to be dusky, but there was a little spray of light swimming through the smoky window above me which diffused into the shadows of the shallow room and made it seem a deeper, different dimension. It was on the dusty bookshelf that I spied a book whose spine appeared to me to look straighter than the others.. The book was clean , but jacket-less, and it gave the impression of having held it's sway amongst the other, similarly aged titles. The title on the spine read as follows: "Anne of Green Gables." The book, in my memory, seems to have shivered and quivered on the shelf. It shouldn't be hard to guess the rest of this story. "Anne of Green Gables" is the book that came home with me that day. From the first page to the end I was enveloped with a keen consciousness of feeling that the magic of my life had finally fallen upon me.

Over a span of 40 years since, I have read many other books and short stories written by Lucy Maud.Montgomery. Though I looked and tried over most of those years, there was scant information to be found concerning the life of Maud herself, so it wasn't until my Mother took a trip to Prince Edward Island back in the 1980's and returned home with a gift which was happily a bio, "The Years Before Anne" by Mr. Bolger, where I finally was able to get an idea of the life of my favorite author. I learned from Bolger's book, or rather was given a hint, of the heartache and unhappiness that seemed to have grabbed on to Maud and followed her throughout her life. Of course, there must have been some happiness for her. There had to be. How else could she know it and write it so well?

There has been scant information over the years concerning Maud Montgomery that I could find in the bookstores of the sandy plains of North Carolina. So, imagine my delight when the Internet Age came upon me, and there I discovered that diaries, 5 volumes of diaries, had scupulously been kept by Maud and then published 40 some years after her death, beginning in the late 1980's. It's hard to fathom the time and work that it took in order to decipher the old fashioned scrawl as was written by hand on the lined pages of ledger books. But thanks to Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, the work was done, and all were published by the time I found them in the late 1990's. It was in the diaries that I discovered Maud's unhappiness for real. However, I drew the conclusion on reading the journals that Maud in writing about her own life, was rather ambiguous and almost manipulative in what she presented , knowing that someday the world would see what she wrote. The biographies are truly just a rendering of her side of the story, a terrible story really.

So, with my deep interest in the subject and because of a characteristic curiosity about things, I have spent a great deal of time in reading all that I can about the life of Maud Montgomery, and mostly reading between the lines. I get impressions and perceptions as I'm reading. These intuitions, right or wrong, run deep with me.