The Winter Muse
Winter is often a time of reflection and this held true with no less intensity than for Anne Shirley of Green Gables. Correction, Anne Blythe who, though no longer residing in Green Gables still had that dear homestead in her heart, always had and always would until, she reflected, she would pass from death into her eternity.
The tall, slim, auburn-haired congenial soul stood and gazed enraptured out her window at the landscaped bedecked with winter perfection; snow lay crisp, untrodden by human feet, the stars sparkled out of a cloudless sky. It was, Anne mused, a perfect night for dreaming, a rare occasion as the wife of a busy doctor with six children to rise. And so she leaned her head upon her hand, the arm rested upon the sill and gave herself up to her fancies. Winter always brought out the nymphs, fairies and others that populated her imagination but they were no match for the thought that prevailed upon her now nor could they ever be. Gilbert Blythe. The very name filled her with something akin to her old childish "thrills"
How had she missed it so many years ago when love had come calling upon her soul? She had resisted its pull but it had gradually wound itself around her, stealing ever so slowly, her resistance until she had fallen beneath it. Love had come softly, serenely, its warmth spread over her in times of good or bad. Love was now her bulwark, her steadying hand in an often chaotic world and that love from the most unlikely source, so unlikely even her wildest imagination could not have made it up. Gilbert was not the tall dark, melancholy picture of romance from her youth; he was more than that. He was as she had once told him too good for her and yet he loved her with an intensity that even she, Anne with her head filled with airy ideas could not fathom. Together they had made a house a home, were raising their children to embrace life, love and the blessings therein with reckless abandon. Gilbert Blythe who had stolen her heart without her knowing it, who showed her grace when she was unlovely, persisted through the tempest of her emotions and watched her grow and open like a flower beneath the warm glow of new love. Oh how much she adored him, her heart nearly burst with it; if he could but know even a fraction of what and how she felt, but if she voiced it, would he again declare she had her head too full of "silly school girl romances"? She smiled faintly at the twinge of embarrassment she felt every time those words flashed into her mind. No, she reasoned, he would go to the moon for her if she asked him too.
Gilbert whom the grim reaper whose name is death had nearly taken from her but had rallied upon seeing his beloved Anne. "I don't want diamond sun bursts or marble halls. I just want you." She had stated then and she meant it more with every passing day.
Anne shuddered involuntarily at the memory of his brush with the fever and how she had nearly lost him. If she had … she pulled her mind hurriedly away, not willing for a moment to entertain such dreadful notions.
"My dearest Gil," she whispered to the snowflakes that begun to fall softly almost unnoticed by the dreamer. "With you by my side, all is right with the world."
She turned from the window, a smile upon her lips, and a song within her breast, the light of love upon her face. And at that moment, Gilbert entered the house to make her world complete.
