Of Shining Waters – Charlottetown, P.E.I – [08/26/2014]

Getting only four hours of sleep before an early morning tour is not perhaps the wisest course of action, but hey it wasn’t on purpose! And that’s why the world invented coffee!

Actually, my participation in the Ultimate Anne of Green Gables tour this morning was somewhat unplanned. Only found out about it a day or so before. I had been intending to sign up, but I kept never getting around to it, until I was on the phone with the tour department for something completely unrelated and she happened to ask why I never signed up for anything, a few minutes later I had the confirmation email in my inbox!

Besides, Amras had IPM today so that worked out well, there are only so many days I can stay on the ship.

You go Sis, go be a kid, I’m super happy you got the slot.

It’s amazing how much you remember that you have no real idea is still in your head from when you were small. Granted, I did attempt a re-read of Anne a week or so ago, but things kept getting in the way and I Never got past the first few chapters.

But I remember it.

Remember enough that I bit back a tiny gasp of appreciation when the guide pointed out the vast sparkling lake on either side of the road as we approached the museum.

For those of you familiar with the books, that is “The Lake of Shining Waters”

Anne, you see, is Canada’s answer to Pollyanna. Only instead of the ‘glad game’, Lucy Maude Montgomery endowed Anne with the most incredible imagination, so she never called anything by it’s “normal” name, in Anne’s eyes, everything – even a country lake – was fantastical.

The Anne of Green Gables museum itself, couldn’t have been more what I needed. Nothing – for me at least – soothes dragons like books, and when I started out this morning the dragons were roaring loud. But this is a literary museum in addition to being part of the inspiration for the books and tucked in the every glass cabinet are books, old books,. As in first editions, the kind of books m fingertips would tremble to handle .The very small of those books is balm to the dragons’ scales.

Every time I do these tours I say I won’t spend anything, in whits case I didn’t even bring money – but then I turned the corner in the tiny dusty gift shop and there was a sale table, and a tiny painted forlorn face just looking at me no box, no certificate of authenticity, just these big deep green eyes, and a price tag that had been marked down, and looked as though it were about to be marked down again.

I am truly such a weak willed person.

But she’s so adorable! Don’t ask me how I’m going to get her home without a box…very very carefully packed in between blankets I suspect…or tucked in my carry-on next to my laptop…

The next and final stop was Green Gables itself. Yes it really does exist, once owned by the Montgomery’s cousins, now the centerpiece of a national park, the house is small; but you can see those famous green rooftops for what feels like miles.

Oddly enough it’s not the house that caught at me. The house has, of course, been lovingly recreated and refurbished, but it’s small size meant that you were basically funneled through one door and out the other without a lot of chance to really stop and take it in.

No, for me it was the walking trails that pulled at me. I didn’t dare go near them, because the driver had specifically told us that we did not have time, and I knew once I stet food in those would I would want nothing more than to lose myself in them as Anne herself so often did.

Montgomery was once quoted as saying that she often felt guilty when forced to admit that Anne was a fictional character, as though she were doing harm to a real person. And walking those grounds, you could understand what she meant.

Walking through those rooms today, feeling her footsteps parallel mine on the other side of the written word, I found myself in agreement with her author – as long as she is loved by so many, that little red-haired, freckled Canadian orphan is so very very real…