L.M. Montgmery hated winter. In Looking for Anne of Green Gables, Irene Gammel, one of the leading scholars of Montgomery’s work, points out that Anne of Green Gables has many delightful scenes of spring, summer, and fall, but almost no scenes of winter beauty except for Christmas and the morning after Anne saves Diana’s sister’s life (147-48). Gammel also tell us that Montgomery dreamed up the luxurious gardens of the book during the winter of 1905, reading flower seed catalogs by the fire when she was snowbound in a cold house with her grandmother (65).
I read L.M. Montgomery’s journals through late winter and early spring of 2017. I felt a curious connection with her, especially when I reached 1898, when she is 23 years old. I was 22. She stopped teaching and moved home to take care of her aging grandmother and try to make a living as a writer. I also lived at home, supported by my parents as I applied to every writing or editing job within a 50-mile radius.
Montgmery’s grandmother wouldn’t let her have a fire in her room during Prince Edward Island’s frigid winters, so she sacrificed privacy for warmth and worked in the kitchen. She lived that life for 13 years. She read, wrote, went to concerts, prayer meetings, literary societies, and parties, weathered winters and enjoyed summers until her grandmother died and she married Ewen Macdonald in 1911. By then, she had published Anne of Green Gables in 1908 and become internationally famous. It wasn’t a perfect happy ending – she experienced marital turbulence, legal battles, and the world-rending of the Great War – but that long season of waiting stood out for me.
I was blessed with a much shorter time of waiting. I found a job within a few months, continued to research L.M. Montgomery’s life and work, and explored the questions of young adulthood: after securing a place to live and a job, what do you live for? How do you build community and fill your time? What is your purpose?
Of all seasons, winter feels most like the time of waiting; at first, we wait for Christmas, and then through February and March, for the relief of spring. We wait for plows to carry away the snow and spread sand and salt so we can drive to work; for our defrosters to melt the ice on our windshields; for sunrise to creep back and sunset to glide forward.
And in that waiting, we rejoice. We hang golden Christmas lights and kindle cozy hearth fires, watch snow soften the silent world, wonder at the blue-light mornings and blazing sunsets, and sip hot chocolate with frozen fingers. We ski or snowshoe through the white-smothered woods, or skate across glass-paved ponds.
In the midst of the early snow in these first weeks of December, I finished the book of Isaiah after studying it since August. As the days darkened and cold settled in, I was awed by the book’s summer-storm beauty: harsh blasts of judgement on idolatry, injustice, and disobedience, followed by the rumblings of forgiveness and warm shower of grace.
Reading Isaiah after the fulfillment of many of its prophecies is a delight. The book gleams with foretellings of the hovering Holy Spirit, the restoration and gathering of the nations, the child Immanuel, the righteous Savior to come, the suffering Servant and triumphant King. The Jewish people waited and wondered for the Messiah for centuries before He came.
Even now, some of the greatest prophecies of Isaiah – the gathering and peace on the holy mountain of the Lord, and the new heavens and the new earth – are still unfulfilled. We are still waiting.
This winter, I hope I can rejoice in the waiting. I want to love the sun glittering on the snow, even in those last days when the drifts are slushy and dirt-encrusted. I want to notice how the lack of leaves lets you see the azure clarity of the sky, and your misty breaths make you feel dragonish. I want to dream up stories that help other people see the enchantment of this frozen world, as well as wait for crocus shoots and thawing breezes, through this time of stillness.
Stories of Yearning 