My Old Friend Anne

When I was eight or nine my mother gave me a stack of used books for Hanukah, along with a grown-up brown leather wallet. That was after she and my dad divorced and before she got remarried and landed a better-paying job, so times were tight. But back then kids we knew didn't get crazy gifts for Hanukah, plus I was a big reader, so books were always cool with me.

Anne of Green Gables was in that stack, and I lived and breathed it and read the whole series of books over and over. The romance between Gilbert Blythe and Anne was one of the great romances of my early life, second only (chronologically anyway) to Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder. 

I still have that first copy of the book, but it's fragile now and the cover fell off years ago, so I recently bought a fresh copy I could break in anew. This past week I was sick as a dog and did nothing but cough and blow my nose and take my temperature (I need up-to-the minute intel when I'm sick), and my fever left me feeling wiped out and dull. I needed the comfort of a beloved book, and so I put down the new Laini Taylor book, Strange the Dreamer (which I will blog about when I finish) and picked up Anne. 

I'm so glad I read it when I was really young, because there's no way to go back in time and have the full effect of a book if you miss the window when you're young. There are so many books I didn't read when I was a kid—many of them because my brothers read them, which made them boy books and therefore to be avoided. I never read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or A Wrinkle in Time as a kid, and by the time I wanted to, there was no way for them to be magical. I could appreciate them, but that's different than living and breathing them. 

But luckily I found Anne at the right time, and I'll always have that. Every night since I started it again, I've gone to bed smiling.