by Jean Little
About one hundred and fifty years ago, the Solden family, living in Germany, had a baby girl and named her Anna. When she was a teenager, her family moved to Canada and young Anna got a job working for Jane Mellis, the mother of six children, as their hired girl. The youngest of the six Mellis children became my grandmother.
When Anna arrived, Grandma was a chubby little girl who was being teased unmercifully by her older brothers and sisters. When Anna discovered they were calling Margaret “Fatty” and laughing at her when she cried, Anna was outraged. She made them call her “Gret” and treat her kindly.
When I was born, I was cross-eyed and I had very poor vision. We lived in Taiwan at first, but when we came to Canada, I was put in a special class for children who had poor eyesight. Our teacher, Miss Bogart, was a lovely woman and, that first year, she taught us to make wastepaper baskets for our parents as a Christmas gift. The baskets were carefully woven out of strong white reeds. On the bottom of the wooden base we printed our initials. Mine was painted green and it looked so perfect I could hardly believe I had made it myself. I was so proud of it.
Then we moved to Guelph and I was enrolled in regular school. There the boys and girls chased me down the street, yelling “Cross-eyed!” after me until I cried. When I got home, Grandma did her best to comfort me and she told me about Anna Solden’s kindness to her when she was a little girl. How I longed for an Anna Solden to rescue me from my tormenters!
I had no friends in those years. I learned to find my friends in books. After a while, I discovered that I not only loved to read stories but I also loved to write.
When I was a teenager like Anna Solden, I wrote a Christmas story called “The Gift” for my mother. It was about a little girl who moved to Canada and wove a wonderful basket. It was eight pages long. I did not want to write about myself, but I did want the girl in my story to come to Canada from a distant country as I had done. I needed a foreign name for her. I thought … and then I was inspired.
“Anna Solden,” I told myself. “I’ll name her after Anna Solden.”
Everyone liked the story and I kept it in a drawer with all my poems and stories.
Years later, I turned the story into a novel.
And there she was, my Anna, being teased, having poor eyesight, weaving a beautiful basket and learning how to make friends.
And the kindness of a German teenager I never knew came down the years and filled my book with love.