Girls Dreaming

 

Anne’s House of Dreams is the fourth in L. M. Montgomery’s beloved Anne books. The first, of course, was Anne of Green Gables, the story of the young red-haired orphan girl coming to live on Prince Edward Island with unmarried brother and sister Matthew and Marilla. In that first book Matthew goes to pick up the boy they are taking in, to help with farm chores, and comes home with a girl instead, much to Marilla’s initial dismay. Anne wakes up the next morning desolate at the thought of being returned to the orphanage, unwanted, but shy Matthew surprisingly champions her acceptance, and Anne is launched into a new life. 

 

My opening image today is of my mother’s wedding announcement in the newspaper, with her orchid corsage pressed beneath the glass of the frame 76 years ago. My copy of Anne’s House of Dreams, copyright 1917, no better than what dealers in used books call a “reading copy,” meaning it’s battered and falling apart but there are no missing pages, bears an inscription written in 1936 on the front-facing endpaper to my mother before she was my mother, before she was even a bride:

 

To Nora – May she be as nice a big girl as she is a little one.

Helen Garner

Hayward Librarian

 

“Little girl” Nora would have been 14 in 1936, just the right age – back then, anyway, in what can’t help but seem like simpler times – to begin dreaming of having a wedding and a house of dreams for herself one day.

 

I wonder if the “Anne of Red Hair” craze is still going strong in Japan. At one time, it seems, not all that long ago, every young Japanese girl had read the Anne books and dreamed of honeymooning on Prince Edward Island, and the very lucky ones actually did so, little P.E.I. coming behind only New York City and Paris, France, as the top dream destination for Japanese brides. All thanks to a series of simple stories for girls written a century ago!

(Well, now I see a serious research paper has been written on the subject. Something else for us to read.)

 

How many girls from poor Japanese fishing villages on coastal islands were ever able to make such an elaborate honeymoon voyage? After Anne marries Gilbert Blythe, which happens early in the House of Dreams book, the newlyweds spend their first month of marriage right there in their first house, rather than travel anywhere at all.

 

“I’m so glad we decided to spend our honeymoon here. Our memories of it will always belong here, in our home of dreams, instead of being scattered about in strange places.” 

 

I can’t help but think, though, how those girls on faraway Japan's coast would have felt the atmosphere of Anne’s first married home as something familiar. Much more than it ever had in Matthew and Marilla’s home in Avonlea, the sea so near to the house in Four Winds Harbour

 

…surrounded her and called to her constantly. From every window of her new home she saw some varying aspect of it. Its haunting murmur was ever in her ears. Vessels sailed up the harbour every day to the wharf at the Glen, or sailed out again through the sunset, bound for ports that might be halfway around the globe. Fishing boats went white-winged down the channel in the mornings, and returned laden in the evenings. Sailors and fisher-folk travelled the red, winding harbour roads, light-hearted and content. There was always a certain sense of things about to happen….

 

There were memories that my mother carried to the first home I knew but kept tucked away, hidden from her daughters’ curious eyes for decades. Even the scrapbook started before her marriage and continued for a time afterward was a treasure my sisters and I saw for the first time after only our mother died and we were going through the house and all her things. But Anne’s House of Dreams, now – the reason my copy is so battered and worn is that all three of Nora’s daughters read and re-read it over the years. (I don’t doubt that one of those girls probably took it up into her hiding place in the backyard apple tree more than once.) Despite not-always-gentle handling, however, it survives.

 

And because I had been looking at my mother’s wedding picture in our tiny upstairs guest bedroom only the day before, last night when I began turning the soft, worn pages of the old volume, I thought of my mother as a young bride – the dreams she would have had and her first married home out in South Dakota. For me, this old book holds all of that.

 

The Enduring Nature of the Written Word

My son came up from Kalamazoo for a five-day visit over the Thanksgiving weekend, and somehow on Sunday morning we found ourselves pawing through an old trunk I had not opened for years. Oh, the treasures that emerged from that archive! 

There were letters he had written me from camp when he was a kid and a little stash of hand-made “coupons” he’d given me as a gift, coupons I could redeem for various chores he would do around the house. “And you didn’t use any of them,” he noted. “I didn’t want to give them up!” I told him. “They were too cute!” Another gem was a handwritten note from a girl in his grade school class, asking me for a copy of a snapshot I’d taken of the two of them at Ian’s birthday party. “I want to see how romantic we look,” she wrote. Or rather, she printed. They must have been in third grade then, not yet learning cursive writing. 

Copies of letters my grandmother had written to my mother were there, along with a copy of a letter one of my aunts had written to my mother, all of this fascinating correspondence concerning the revelation of an old family secret. I read the letters aloud to my son, refreshing my own memory with the details. I’ll keep in mind this winter the fact that my mother’s parents were married in February of 1918, making it a century ago three months from now. 

I found a box of color slides from photographs I took during my two years in Cincinnati (1987-88) and will have those made into prints and also stored on DVD very soon. (The architecture of Cincinnati fascinated me, as did the hilly terrain. It was rich territory to explore with a camera.) I also found handful after handful of photographic prints, some dating back fifty years or more. The color was not always the best, but everyone in the pictures was recognizable.

A very modest collection of receipts and tissue wrappings from purchases (e.g., cheese) made in Paris appeared. I could never bear to throw away any scrap of paper that came my way in France, with words printed in French and sometimes a reproduced line drawing of a shop front or of the Eiffel Tower. You must understand that I shivered with pleasure over the phrase “vêtements d’hiver” (winter clothes) scrawled on a box in the closet of the apartment where I first stayed in Paris. Four years of high school French and the smattering I’d picked up before that from my father had not fully prepared me for the wonder of being in a foreign country and actually managing to make my way around in another language, one I felt I’d learned in a way somewhat similar to the way I had learned to read music, another mysterious, magic, “other” language. It worked! I felt like a gifted code-cracker!

But there is plenty of magic in English, and I was thrilled to discover in the trunk a couple of irreplaceable family items I had been afraid I’d lost forever. Before they married, before they had even met, my father and my mother, each separately, collected into little books their favorite poems. In 1974 the two books were given to me. With the exception of one verse my father composed with his high school French, my parents did not themselves write any of the works in their books, but their selections are windows into their youthful sensibilities. 

What did these two young people have in common? What aspects of their personalities were very different? Some overlap between the two collections gives clues, as do the majority of items found in one book but not in another. 

Neither book has either table of contents or index, but my father’s, titled “Favora Quotation Gilberti,” dated1941, begins with an “Indication of general trend…” listing eight attributes: amusing; slightly risqué; cynical philosophy; toward celibacy; satire; truism; good phrasing; and romantic: beautiful and healthy sentiment. Not everything in his book is a poem. Many entries are simply pithy sayings, and many verses and pithy sayings are attributed to “Anon,” for example this ironic observation that gives the lie to my entire thesis today:

Lives of great men all remind us 

As their pages o’er we turn, 

That we’re apt to leave behind us 

Letters that we ought to burn. 

There is no indication which heading he would have assigned here. Cynical, probably. There was more of cynicism and satire in my father’s collection than in my mothers, but both had generous helpings of romantic choices. And both include pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though I note that my father attributes the latter’s words to “Elizabeth Browning,” omitting the poet’s family name, while my mother invariably used all three names.

My mother’s collection includes Sara Teasdale, Eugene Field, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I don’t find as many entries from “Anon.” as my father had, but a few, such as the two lists “Helps for Daily Living” and “Married Wisdom” have no attribution. (Actually, the latter, which is the first piece in her book, says “Author Unknown.” Could it be that favorite of my father, “Anon.”?!) My mother’s collection also has more entries from women, the names often unfamiliar to me. There are also fewer humorous pieces in my mother’s book, so Richard’s Armour’s “A Thousand Times No” stands out: 

Some take great pride in saying No, 

They scorn an easy Yes. 

Assent is sign of weakness, so 

To none will they confess. 

For utterance of No they live, 

Nor would they have you doubt it. 

They’re very, very negative 

And positive about it!

At the end of my mother’s collection, following Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Use of Time” and Sarah Dunnings’s “These Things I Love,” comes a list of dated topics for what looks like a music class, “Hints for Song Leaders,” “How to Present a New Song,” and finally a recipe for Helen’s Peanut Butter Cookies, but my mother’s name appears nowhere in her book.  

Besides family memorabilia, I found in the trunk many bundles of letters from friends, a few with literary associations. There were two letters from Jim Harrison, one from Joyce, Jim’s assistant, three from Guy de la Valdene, and one from poet Dan Gerber, all these resulting from typing, proof-reading, and editing I’d done for him and Guy and Dan back in the old days. 

Then there was a xeroxed copy of the wonderful handwritten journal my sister kept on her first trip (with now-husband Bob) to the Boundary Waters, up from Minnesota into Canada, her first wilderness experience, with canoe portages and camp coffee and losing her camera to a black bear! I read aloud from the pages to my son (with David listening from the next room) and especially loved the full page listing of all the sounds of the wilderness, none having anything to do with traffic or phones.

All these memories are priceless to me, despite the mustiness of a trunk that had been closed for years. 

As I held color slides up to the light, exclaiming over the images, my son made a comment about digitizing old media files, and that’s well and good, I suppose. But if hard copies are not kept, if only digital files remain, I worry that those files could become unopenable black boxes to future generations. They are not, after all, human-readable, and as the technology to read digital files advances as breakneck speed, earlier readers become so much junk. There is also the question of “where” the files will be stored. In a “cloud”? As my son noted, “A cloud is just someone else’s computer.” 

I’ve never liked the idea of keeping my photographs or books in a cloud, anyway, and I wouldn’t want to reduce precious old letters from friends and family and photographs of same to someone else's storage black box. My old black trunk has served me well. And I have always been in love with paper and with holding physical objects in my hands. 

Sliding sheets of handwriting from envelopes (first appreciating the beautiful postage stamps), turning pages, shuffling and stacking snapshots and slides are pleasures I have no intention of foregoing, as long as they are available to me, and I hope that will be for the rest of my life.