It is a certain homecoming for me, too!
In a personal way, it seems strangely poignant that Maud--always self-searching and with a book on hand-- had missed the profoundly correspondent themes about home and self in Thomas Wolfe's works. After all, they were living in a contemporary world. How could she have missed him?
Maud:
Sunday, June 27, 1915
The Manse, Cavendish, PEI...Last night I had a very dear, very sad, very strange and unlooked for experience.
When I was on the Island before I shrank from the very thought of going near my old home. This year I felt the same until last night. I was on the manse veranda. The dew was falling. In the south-east a large, hazy, full moon was rising. To my left lay the dark trees that screened th old house from sight. suddenly an irresistible longing took possession of me to go to it once more--in that pale enchantment of moonlight when one might chance to slip back through some magic loophole into the olden years. I could not withstand it. I slipped over the church grounds and through the old gap in the fence through which I used to go to church. I walked along the meadow edge where the foot path used to be, past the grove of spruces, and on till the old house lay before me in a soft, silvery shadow. I turned aside for a moment to the old well and looked down it. The ferns that always lined its sides had grown completely across it.
I went on to the old kitchen door. Beside it, every summer a certain shoot of balsam poplar used to start up, to be trodden down under passing feet. Since the old house was closed it had been able to grow and so fast had it grown that the whole angle between the kitchen and the cook house was full of it. It as as high as the kitchen roof.
I went around to the end of the house and stood under my old window. The moon was floating over the valley below. I had looked on that very scene a thousand times on moonlit nights of long ago. My heart beat with mingled pain and pleasure until it almost choked me. Everything in that kind radiance seemed so much the same. For a space the years turned back their pages. The silent sleepers in the graveyard yonder wakened and filled their old places. Grandfather and grandmother read in the lighted kitchen. Old friends and comrades walked with me in the lane. Daffy frisked in the caraway. Above me my old white bed waited for me to press its pillow of dreams.
Most of the windows were boarded up but the south one in the parlor was not. through it I could see the bare old room distinctly with the black mantelpiece that was the admiration of my childhood. I went around and stood on the stone steps of the front door. The old "front orchard" and the grove beside it seemed more bowery and bosky than of yore but I think that was only because i have grown used to a thinner screen of trees on my Leaskdale lawn. How lovely and lonely it all was, and yet how unreal. I seemed to be in a dream--and yet it seemed th only waking. Oh, as long as that moonlit magic worked the past was mine once more--the old past, before the last sad years had spent in the old home. Oh, beloved old place, that half hour I spent with you last night was worth the coming from a far land. You were glad, I think to have me back---me, who loved you so. For there is not one living now but me who loves you--not one. As I stood there I seemed to feel a presence enfolding me as if it claimed me--as if something that had been forsaken and desolate were once more rejoicing in my affection. Have not old homesteads souls that cling to them until they crumble to dust?
I could hardly tear myself away from the spot. Perhaps the charm it had for me is not a wholesome one--not altogether one to which it was well to yield. Perhaps the dead past should bury it's dead. It may not be well to linger too long among ghosts, lest they lay a cold grasp upon you and bind you too closely to their chill, sweet, unearthly companionship. Certainly all the pleasures and joys of my real life seemed to grow pale and fade into nothingness beside the strange enchantment of that shadowy tryst."
The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, pp 168 - 169, Rubio & Waterston
"...and he had an instant sense of something re-found that he had always known--something far, near, strange, and so familiar--and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream."
Thmas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again"
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