Summer and Lucy Maud

Summer sunshine can be so enticing. Who wants to be indoors while the sun is bright and the air is warm? Add sea breezes to the mix and shamelessly, thoughts of obligations and even well intentioned plans can be pushed off for other days. I truly intended to be doing so many things this summer. I had such grand plans. Here it is, the start of August, and alas, I failed rather miserably.

What I have been doing is probably more important. For the last eleven years, I have been in western Canada, far from my roots and origins in so many different ways. As the dog frolicked about in Malpeque and Spring Valley, I have spent my time with my stack of novels and visiting with family and people from my past. I have focused on being present and listening to the whispers of my internal voice. There are a lot of decisions that are going to need to be made and while logic has its place in decision making, when it comes to life, the internal whispers are the real source for anybody’s truth.

This year, 2024, is the 150th anniversary of PEI’s beloved author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. I would be lying if I said that Lucy Maud Montgomery’s work had not influenced my life growing up. It had a very strong influence. I read Anne of Green Gables for the first time when I was 8. I very distinctly remember reading the book that summer.

With the first few phonics lessons in grade 1, I grasped onto the concepts with delight and started to see just how many words I could figure out on my own and how many books I could read. By the time that I picked up Anne of Green Gables, I had not yet gotten bold enough to pick up an “adult book”. This was my first one, and I remember that it took me a whole week to read it.

Last summer, when I returned to PEI for a week, I found the book on my old bookshelf. I picked it up off the shelf and looking at the yellowing pages and the tattered cover, I decided to read it again for the first time in decades. 

What I found in the book was a time capsule. The way of life and the way of thinking was so PEI to me. Not as PEI is now, and not even really as it was when I was growing up. But the book echoed a lot of statements, beliefs, and ways of life that I remember from my grandparents, and for some reason, it really made me think of one of my grandmothers. It was at that time that I realised that her mother, my great-grandmother, was just a year younger than Lucy Maud Montgomery and given where their families lived, it would not surprise me in the least if they had at some point crossed paths. I do remember my great-grandmother as she lived to be well over 100. As I read Anne of Green Gables and started re-reading Anne of Avonlea last summer, I found myself missing my grandmother.

This time, I picked up Anne of the Island, and am now re-reading Anne of Windy Poplars. As I read, I find myself going back through the remembrances of my childhood and teenage years, and allowing myself to consider who I am, where I am, and what those internal whispers are trying to tell me about my upcoming decisions. I believe that the best decisions have the roots deep within a person’s core. My summer of sunshine and salty air has helped to strip away the veneer that life inadvertently adds to a person and that can sometimes be mistaken as belonging to the person.

Seeing and hearing about Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 150th birthday this year had been a reminder of not only the influence of her work, but of the influence of my family and the community that shaped me as a person. Very soon, I will return to western Canada and will begin to make the decisions and arrangements that will shape the next chapter of my life. I left Fort McMurray in May, feeling unsure of so many things. I am returning with a renewed sense of myself and my roots. Probably the best part of this summer, as I discovered both last summer and this past week as I re-read Anne of the Island, is that I will always be able to catch glimpses of my roots among the pages of Anne Shirley, Emily Byrd Starr, and the other heroines that Lucy Maud Montgomery put to paper a century ago.

Literature is powerful. It is evocative. It is so many things, but most importantly, it speaks to the identity of a person, a time, and a society. It evokes memories connected to the stories. It also evokes memories of the time when the story is first read and first heard. Time with a novel is not time wasted. It is time well spent. So, my vacation was well spent. And as for anyone who is reading this - go ahead! Enjoy the warm sunshine, the beach, if there is one nearby, and that novel that you have been dying to read!