Avonlea--Love of my heart

I had forgotten how much I loved Anne of Green Gables. It has been years since I had watched the movies and somehow they had faded into a pleasant, girlhood memory and little else. I thought of Anne with gentle, patronizing complacency, but she was not alive to me anymore.

Then a blogging friend hosted an Anne of Green Gables week and part of that girlish love was revived. And then...and then we borrowed the films from the library and my heart was ripped in two and pieced back together with a glorious stitchery of the red Avonlea roads and Anne-esque dreams, the blue blue sea and those simpler days. I literally sat dumbfounded, wondering how I could ever have forgot it. Forgot the precious story with its precious people.

I sat on the couch with my sisters, watching 7 year-old Abigail experience Anne for nearly the first time in her life. That light in her eyes was me all over again. How could I forget? 

Leah and I had an Anne of Green Gables marathon last night and watched the movie all evening long. I laughed over Anne's scrapes, cheered over her triumphs, fell in love over Gilbert (*giggle*) and generally was transported. As I went up to bed last night it struck me--I had tasted my life again as it was seven or eight years ago. I was only twelve and my womanhood stretched long before me like a flickering afternoon shadow, untouched.  I had simple hopes, simple pleasures.

The memories came flooding over me, unsought but powerful...

...traipsing through our neighborhood clad in a pinned up tablecloth for lack of a proper Victorian skirt...

...my first attempts at a pompadour...

...laying on Dad's trailer with a single red rose clasped to my breast, pretending I was Anne who, in turn, pretended to be The Lady of Shalott...

I hereby declare I want to name one of my daughters "Anne" :)

I hadn't realized how much that Anne-girl has shaped my girlhood and my life. I learned to dream in Avonlea. I learned to imagine, to write, to create, to love. Everyone has their soul-book; that one piece of literature that stands above all else and speaks to their heart. Anne of Green Gables is mine, for in it I realized that a simple girlhood is mine for the taking whenever I choose to walk that road to Avonlea. 

Yes. I caught a glimpse of how far I've come. I'm turning twenty years old in a matter of a few short months. According to Anne and Miss Stacey, my character will be much formed by that point. I cried last night, hardly knowing why, but it had something to do with the fact that I have lived those "growing up" years that once seemed to loom so glorious and frightening on the horizon of my twelve-year-old imagination. I stand now where the brook and the river meet, so to speak, and I tremble slightly at the force of that great river, wondering whether the brook with her purling windings and wind-song mightn't be the pleasanter one after all. But the pull of the tide lures me on to the river, onto his broad, glistening wings and I must follow.

I am grown up now...

Quite grown up.

And yet I know that anytime the cares of being a young lady press to close about me, all I have to do is come winging back to the dear arms of my old friends in Avonlea...somehow life is simpler, sweeter when viewed from the front porch of Green Gables.

Never grow too old, girls. Never forget your girlish loves. 

Never become too wise to fall in love with Gilbert...

Someone please find one of him for me! <3

 ...too sober to laugh over the mouse drowned in the pudding sauce....

.... too grown up to remember the hopes and dreams of your girlhood years.

 These things are a precious gift. <3