Dear Kindred Spirits.(services of the publishing industry)(Editorial)

Valancy ... could look out of the window, through the big pine boughs that actually touched it, away up Mistawis, white and lustrous as a pavement of pearl ... ~The Blue Castle

One evening in the Leaskdale manse in 1914, LM Montgomery read an entertaining article in the Bookman. It was a questionnaire Confessions in an Album on one's own preferences and dislikes as had been in vogue many years before. Maud spent that evening answering the queries, No. 2 Your favorite tree--most certainly the pine wrote Maud. I first got well acquainted with pines in Halifax Park. She wove them into her book Anne of the Island while in Leaskdale where many pine grew in Scott township.

In January, 1908, back in Cavendish, she had written and published the poem Among the Pines. The words of the second verse particularly lend hidden and thoughtful beauty.

 
   Deep let us breathe the ripeness and 
   savor of balsam, 
   Tears that the pines have wept in 
   sorrow sweet, 
   With its aroma comes beguilement of 
   things forgotten, 
   Long-past hopes of the years on 
   tip-toeing feet. 

When the Macdonalds moved to Norval in 1926 Russels' Hill of pines was a thing to remember forever as she gazed through the hall or dining room windows at those god-like trees rising majestic out of the white sweep of snow. The family holiday in 1922 among the dark pines of Muskoka obviously inspired her novel The Blue Castle.

The endurance of pine sustained LM Montgomery all her life. At Journey's End, she, like Valancy, could lie in bed and gaze at the pines against a moonlit sky. As ever, she wrote, they wave a message of courage and hope. It was delightful to see the boughs of pine decorating the Bideford Parsonage Museum from the wicker stand at the front door to all the rooms within two years ago at Christmas time. I couldn't help but think it signified the courage of local Bideford Residents keeping the spirit of LM Montgomery alive as the young school teacher that boarded there a hundred years before. So it is with courage and fortitude that Kindred Spirits moves on to a new format and presentation after fifteen years. With Ruth and Laura at the helm with George, it ...