my new photo

Taken from the book jacket of "The Gift of Wings" by Mary Rubio

Anne of Green Gables Marathon on PBS today

Anne of Avonlea

frontispiece

"to my former teacher HATTIE GORDON SMITH
in grateful remembrance of her sympathy and encouragement"

"Flowers spring to blossom where she walks

The careful ways of duty,

Our hard, stiff lines of life with her

Are flowing curves of beauty". -WHITTIER

Miss Stacy, in Anne of Avonlea, was based on LM Montgomery's beloved teacher, Hattie Gordon. My latest viewing of Sullivan's Anne II on PBS has brought the transparency of Miss Stacy's character to the forefront of my awareness concerning Montgomery's mindset at the time of writing the Anne series.

Miss Hattie was indeed an important, real figure in the memories of childhood, and Montgomery breathed life into her again in the penning of "Anne of Avonlea."

Anne's Room, Comparing Dickinson, A brush with Browning

If it weren't so far away, I would go back to Cavendish today and retake the photo of Anne's room at Green Gables and figure out how to get that window from blowing out like that. Of course, good photography takes concentration and that's one thing you can't have in a Tourist attraction, especially a small, crowded space like Green Gables.  

I added a lot of contrast and color to the photo by using a Vintage photo editor. The vintage effect applied a strong vignette which will not print out well, but I did get a fairly nice 5 x 7 on this without all of the added vintage drama.

I Compare this room to Emily Dickinson's room at Amherst and I find similarities.

On another note, I have found I have a relative in our local graveyard when I had my sisters DNA tested. I was able to line this person up in her dna matches and family tree, so I wrote to the living relative and got a portrait and a lot of information that local historians did not have before, including the family history such as a candlelight wedding in the Episcopal Church and the telling that one of his descendants had enjoyed tea with Robert Browning while taking a tour in Europe. Cool. 

I love the poem by Dickinson called "a day" and I wanted to share it as it is very very pretty and it reminds me of Maud, and if you compare the rooms of the two writers, (though not literally) you can see that there perhaps were some similarities.

A Day

I'll tell you how the sun rose,--
A ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.
The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
"That must have been the sun!" 
But how he set, I know not.
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while
Till when they reached the other side,
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away.

Emily Dickinson

A collage of Anne's Room in Green Gables , Dickinson's Room in Amherst, MA and my Washington relative buried here in New Bern.