All things being relative in a parallel world....July & August 1915

Maud wrote often of the "hot" summers on PEI with the house full of company (Uncle Leander and entourage.)  Her discomfort seems incredible after I found that the high temps for the Island are recorded as 73 degrees for the month of July.  Yesterday, it was 102 degrees here on the inner banks of North Carolina.  (73 degrees is the mark where we set our air conditioners in order to feel comfortable in our homes.)

Perhaps it felt hotter in Maud's grandmother's house, because of the baking that she was required to do, and with the long hair, dresses and layers of underclothing.

All things being relative in a parallel universe...
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One of the important lessons that may be gleaned from reading Maud's Journals (and it's a big one) is that it might be better not to depend on your children for your happiness. This passage is coming from Maud long before some even harder blows befell her.  It seems evident by this passage that Maud was always prone to depression..

The Manse, Leaskdale, Ont
August 13, 1915

"It is just a year to-day since little Hugh was born dead.  Oh, that hideous day!  Shall I ever be able to forget its agony?  And will it be repeated in October?  This thought is ever present with me.  I have had some bad attacks of nervous depression lately--one last night that was almost unbearable.  My condition--the war news --the weather--all combined to make me very miserable.  Sometimes I feel so unutterably disheartened that if it were not for Chester it seems to me that I would rather not go on living."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p. 171, Rubio & Waterston 

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A lovely walk with her cousin Frede at Park Corner...

Park Corner

Sunday, July 18, 1915

Tomorrow I leave Park Corner...To-night Frede and I planned to have a walk together over the bridge in the dusk--a last farewell walk, the last one we could have there for many years--perhaps forever.  In the twilight we slipped away and had our hour.  The western sky was full of the hues of a weird sunset.  Before us the old pond lay in shadow and silver.  The evening was very still, very calm, very clear.  And through the stillness came the strangest, saddest most unforgettable sound in nature--the soft, ceaseless wash on a distant shore of the breakers of a spent storm.  It is more mournful than the rain wind of night--the heartbreak of all creation is in it.

  Frede and I walked back and forth over the bridge many times, sometimes in silence, sometimes speaking lowly of the deepest thoughts in our hearts.  We seemed a part of the night--of the dreaming water, of the dusk in the cloudy firs, of the far remote stars, of that haunting moan of the sea.  And when the twilight suddenly was night and the shining new moon swung above the tree tops that bend over that old homestead, we walked away from the glamor in a silence that touched the lands of dream and tears."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p 170, Rubio & Waterston