Granny-Long-Legs
I wake early, especially in summer, and on Monday at 5 o’clock I’d had enough of lying in bed, and by 6 I was out of the house and walking the lanes. No one else was about; it was just me, the birds, the trees and the sunshine. The silence was wonderful; farmers had not started their tractors or begun to round up sheep, cows were obligingly quiet. I stood and listened to the silence, drank it in. Our lives are filled with noise and silence is the exception. I began to appreciate why nuns and monks live lives of quietness; there is something about silence that fills you in a way that noise, even music, does not.
The sun was up but low in the east and it cast long shadows on the road in front of me so that my own shadow appeared as something like a cartoon character of a very, very tall person – a Daddy-Long-Legs, or rather a Granny-Long-Legs. I remembered the story about the orphan who only saw her benefactor as the shadow of a crane fly, and addressed him in thank you letters as Dear Daddy-Long-Legs. When I got home I searched for the novel in our bookcases and there it was, in its red cover, rather elderly but in good condition – a bit like me.
I began to read it and looked online for more information. It was first published in 1912, and its American author, Jean Webster, enjoyed great success. Sadly, her success lived longer than she did – she had her first child and the next day died of puerperal fever.
I read about LM Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables stories. Those are happy books so I was disappointed to read that Lucy’s life had not been so happy. She had given up the man she loved, married someone more suitable and endured a miserable marriage and the death of one of her sons.
I felt depressed.
Did one have to have an unhappy/tragic life to be a writer? If so I should be thankful that I was unpublished and content.
