Amidst all the sadness, episodes like this one really help to brighten up the mood. Anne gets her own room (with Katie Morris included) and meets a guy who plays cello and sells eggs, who’s going to teach her how to read. She’s still such an adorable little child.
The episode starts with the carriage loaded with all of the stuff that they took from their old house, as it heads to Marysville. The snow has stopped and Horace and Edward are fooling around again. When Anne starts talking to Katie Morris again, the two of them start making fun of her. Johanna asks what kind of home they’re going to live in, but Bert says not to expect too much. It’s not a very big home, but there are three bedrooms: one for Johanna and the kids, one for Horace and Edward and one for Anne herself (probably as thanks for offering Bert the job in the first place. Anne obviously get elated when she hears this.
When they arrive at the house, Bert and Johanna immediately start with unloading the carriage, but Anne is too impatient to see her own room (and Horace and Edward are already running around the house like crazy). When Anne sees her room, she is the most happy to find a window. She’s a bit disappointed that there is no lake that she can see, but quickly lets her imagination make up for it. Bert and Johanna then appear, carrying Katie Morris inside her room. Apparently there was no other place for it, so they just let Anne have it (to Anne’s delight, of course).
Anne’s attention also falls to a worn-out mat that’s sitting in a corner, and she reckons that she can make something out of it once she cleans it, so she gets to have that too. A bit later, Bert and Johanna leave (very rare for the two of them to be something together): Bert to his new job and Johanna to do the groceries. when they left, Anne grabs a brush and starts cleaning the mat and gets excited when she finds out that behind the dirt it indeed has a nice colour.
When they’re in the town and split ways, Johanna asks around for the nearest shop to buy salt and eggs. As it turns out, eggs are rather expensive in this town. Only a guy named “eggman” seems to sell them cheaply, though he seems to be a bit of a strange fellow. Bert meanwhile meets his new employer: Jeffrey Parker.
Anne is meanwhile preparing the potatoes as the two of Bert and Johanna get back. Johanna however isn’t pleased to find out that Anne used a brand new brush to clean the mat, and she gets really angry at Anne for basically ruining it right after it was bought. During dinner, Horace notes that there are lots of squirrels in the forest around them. As a punishment for ruining the mat, Johanna sends her out the next day to get some eggs from eggman, who apparently according to one of the stories Bert heard is a magician.
On the way to eggman, Anne’s imagination of course has enough opportunity to form all sorts of crazy theories about the guy. On the way there she also spots a Moose. When she gets to eggman’s house, a cello suddenly starts playing. She then sees a wounded chicken and knocks on the guy’s door, carrying the chicken. The door opens, though Anne is too scared to say something so he closes the door again. She knocks for a second time and then she does get the chance to ask for some eggs, and tell him that one of his chickens has been hurt.
He fies up the chicken, and then asks her to bring him the basket to put the eggs in. He asks her how much, which she misinterprets as him asking for her age, so she happily tells him that she’s six years old before he can say to her that he meant how many eggs she wanted, so eventually she walks out with twelve nice eggs. He then starts playing his cello again and she listens by his window a bit more, to suddenly see that he’s crying a bit.
Anne then falls off and makes some sound that make eggman notice her standing beside her window. When she’s discovered she scaredly starts telling him about all the strange ideas she had about him and his cello. While she fell, she also hurt her leg, so eggman takes her inside in order to treat her. He then introduces her to his cello. It then turns out that eggman is pretty interested in Anne’s imagination, and when she says that she actually isn’t allowed to imagine from Johanna, eggman instead tries to convince her that imagination is very powerful. He then writes down the word “Imagination” on paper, which I guess is pretty appropriate to be the first word Anne learns to read and write.
Anne then comes back to Johanna, and happily tells her how eggman isn’t the evil magician they thought to be, and the episode ends.
I guess that eggman is going to be Anne’s mentor for the future, just like how the new teacher was this for Emily and her friends. It’s good to see that she’s finally learning how to read, and I think that this is either going to be the first step of Johanna to send her to school, or he’s going to teach her until whatever is going to happen that’s going to cause Anne to move out. With such a happy episode as this one, it’s hard to believe the drama that went on in the previous episodes. The only drama in this episode really came from typical children’s antics: accidentally ruining something brand new in one’s enthusiasm, or not knowing when to stop talking. This show really has some awesome nostalgic moments.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Quiet and happy episode was happy and quiet.
