Just saying hello

No profound thoughts to share today. Just wanted to say hello to anyone who is out there. I've read that blogging is addictive and it truly is. Not just the chance to express your own thoughts and in the process, clarify them, but the pleasure of dipping into other people's lives and reading about their experiences and having the chance to connect with them. I could wander about the blogosphere for hours (if there weren't clothes to fold, kitchen benches to wipe, small, warm bodies that need bathing and cuddling, cheques to write.....you get the picture).

When I set up this blog for fun on my birthday, I sort of forgot to save it in my favourites, so I googled "Hester's garden" to find it. (It didn't work!). By a strange and lovely coincidence, one of the Google results was a quote from the Anne of Green Gables series of books by L. M. Montgomery. By another coincidence, that weekend was the 100th anniversary of the first edition of the original book and there was an article about Prince Edward Island in the travel section of the weekend paper. Those books are old favourites and dear friends of mine. I often turn to them to reread favourite bits and, in my youth, when I had more time and pocketmoney, I used to trawl through second hand book shops and buy lovely old editions. I was fascinated by the way images of Anne changed as new editions were published over the decades. I have my own set of hardbacks from my 1970s childhood, a beautiful 1912 first edition of Chronicles of Avonlea with a watercolour plate of an Edwardian looking Anne, and some 1950s ones with Anne looking like something from an advertisement for household appliances. I also have a 1920s edition of Anne's House of Dreams where she looks like a flapper.

Anyway..... I think it was in Anne of Avonlea that Anne and Diana discover an old overgrown garden that once belonged to a girl named Hester Gray. I had forgotten all about Hester Gray's garden but maybe it was a subconscious influence on my choice of name for my new blog. I've just found the quotation so here it is for anyone who likes that sort of thing .....

Just before them, hemmed in by beeches and firs but open to the south, was a little corner and in it a garden...or what had once been a garden. A tumble-down stone dyke, overgrown with mosses and grass, surrounded it. Along the eastern side ran a row of garden cherry trees, white as a snowdrift. There were traces of old paths still and a double line of rose-bushes throught the middle.....Oh, how perfectly lovely!" three of the girls cried.

I feel inspired to go outside and weed my garden!