A huge cherry-tree grew outside, so close that its boughs tapped against the house, and it was so thickset with blossoms that hardly a leaf was to be seen. [. . .] In the garden below were lilac trees purple with flowers, and their dizzily sweet fragrance drifted up to the window on the morning wind.
Below the garden a green field lush with clover sloped down to the hollow where the brook ran and where scores of white birches grew, upspringing airily out of an undergrowth suggestive of delightful possibilities in ferns and mosses and woodsy things generally (Anne of Green Gables, chapter 4).
Now, for me, this sounds like an amazing place to live. A brook, a house surrounding by flowering trees, grassy meadows, hills...what more could you ask for? It's even set apart from the center of town, to give it more privacy. In my opinion, it would be the perfect place to live.
I hadn't really given much thought to the way the house itself looked, except that it would have an interesting shape, with all sorts of arches, gables, and maybe even a turret. It was the perfect place for someone who loved fairies, and dryads, and all kinds of enchanted things--someone like Anne, and also, someone like me.
But then, when I looked up Anne of Green Gables on Wikipedia, I can across this picture of the house that inspired Lucy Maud Montgomery as she was envisioning Green Gables:
To be honest, I was horribly disappointed. It's too...well...open. And too sunny. And the gravel driveway takes away any romance the place might have. The house itself isn't right either; it's too boxy, too much of a common farmhouse.
So maybe Anne and I are alike in another way. We both prefer our imaginations to reality, because then we "can imagine what [things] looked like, without being hampered by facts" (Anne of Avonlea, chapter 13).
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