While holed up in a hotel room this week, I finished Anne of Green Gables for Carrie’s L.M. Montgomery Reading Challenge.
I couldn’t help but notice Montgomery’s description of Anne’s bedroom. The room is described on three different occasions.
When Anne first arrives at Green Gables:
“The whitewashed walls were so painfully bare and staring that [Anne] thought they must ache over their own bareness. The floor was bare, too, except for a round braided mat in the middle such as Anne had never seen before. In one corner was the bed, a high, old-fashioned one with four dark, low-turned posts. In the other corner was the aforesaid three-cornered table adorned with a fat, red velvet pincushion hard enough to turn the point of the most adventurous pin. Above it hung a little six by eight mirror. Midway between table and bed was the window, with an icy white muslin frill over it, and opposite it was the washstand. The whole apartment was of a rigidity not to be described in words, but which sent a shiver to the very marrow of Anne’s bones.
Then there’s what Anne imagines her bedroom might look like:
“Now I’m going to imagine things into this room so that they’ll always stay imagined. The floor is covered with a white velvet carpet with pink roses all over it and there are pink silk curtains at the windows. The walls are hung with gold and silver brocade tapestry. The furniture is mahogany. I never saw any mahogany, but it does sound so luxurious. This is a couch all heaped with gorgeous silken cushions, pink and blue and crimson and gold, and I am reclining gracefully on it. I can see my reflection in that splendid big mirror hanging on the wall.”
Finally, there’s her bedroom after she’s lived there several years, and grown up quite a bit:
“The velvet carpet with the pink roses and the pink silk curtains of Anne’s early visions had certainly never materialized; but her dreams had kept pace with her growth, and it is not probable that she lamented them. The floor was covered with a pretty matting, and the curtains that softened the high window and fluttered in the vagrant breezes were of pale green art muslin. The walls, hung not with gold and silver brocade tapestry, but with a dainty apple blossom paper, were adorned with a few good pictures given Anne by Mrs. Allan…”
After a week in a hotel room, I’m gladder than glad to be at home, in my own bed in my own room at my own house.
This week’s prompt is about your childhood room:
“What was your bedroom like growing up? Did you share it with your siblings, or did you have it to yourself? Can you remember the carpeting, the wallpaper, the pictures that hung? What did you do to make it your own?”