The Real St. Norbert

I made it. To my grandmother’s hometown. Fnally. It’s amazing, actually, because it took me forever to get here. 10 days. But really, 37 years. I only thought about visiting this place several months ago. only realized that it was actually within my reach. but really, from my hometown, it’s maybe only an 8 hour drive. What the hell. Why on earth did we never come here as children? Doesn’t make sense to me.

My feelings seeing it were muted, or eclipse perhaps, by my sadness over leaving St. Cuthbert, by far one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited in my life. This is in part, perhaps, to preference – I looooooooooove fields, and this was endless fields of corn, crops, and also, the heart of la region biologique – or, organic produce, farms, the simple, natural way. And the houses, the people were very European. I felt like I was in a small European town the entire time.

Here, there are also endless fields, and I’m not sure that my pictures capture the difference between the topography of the two places. Just that, here, there are many more trees, forests. In st. Cuthbert, there were no forests; just endless fields, open spaces. That’s it. Open spaces. That’s what I love. Open nature, with some trees, but fields. There are many fields here, but surrounded by forests.

Nonetheless, my grandmother’s birthplace is gorgeous. Truly. The people in her little town seem somehow less educated than the people in, for example, the little town of St. Cuthbert. Perhaps the difference is the proximity to Montreal, though, this is only about 1 hour further from montreal than St. Cuthbert. I’m not really sure. The towns surrounding St. Cuthbert – Berthierville, and Joliette, also, were not ‘very educated.’ Those towns felt economically depressed in at least some ways. Or, as much of the population was uneducated as educated. St. Cuthbert feels very educated – even if informal, the people seem that they are naturally curious and take initiative to educate themselves (like my mother’s father) – though it is very simple. Simple, natural, and deliberate in both these things. That’s it. Deliberate. This town, St. Norbert, and surrounding towns of Norbertville and Victoriaville, are simple and formally uneducated…and that’s just the way people are around here. They feel, perhaps, like this is the lot they were dealt, and that’s how they must live. In St. Cuthbert, it’s as if they intentionally set out to live as such, and are happy, fulfilled, proud of their choice. It’s as if St. Cuthbert were created intentionally to fulfill certain ideals, and St. Norbert is simply how things always were and the people, for some reason, don’t know or don’t feel like they have a choice. The people in St. Cuthbert are very aware of the beauty around them; here, they seemingly are not.

I found a B&B here, which made me sad because it’s not Louise and Francine’s B&B, which is truly the best I’ve ever been to. This one is fine, but the woman is “nice enough,” nothing extra. Perhaps simply more reserved, less aware of the beauty around her, I’m not sure. The difference between people here and on the other side of the St. Laurent.

I saw my grandmother’s street – le cinquieme Rang. Beautiful. Farms, farmland, more farms. Took many pictures. Went to the church in Norbertville, and the cemetery to the side of it. I looked for my great-uncle who’s buried there, but couldn’t find his stone – some are too old to read, and my guess is one is his since there’s no family around anymore to keep up the stones.

I wanted to find my grandmother’s birth certificate, so I tried to get inside the church to see if anyone might be there. I had a feeling it would be really hard to find someone to speak to, because these older churches in these older towns are no longer inhabited by priests…things are simply done habitually, on an as needed basis, with perhaps one or several masses per week.

So, after trying a bit, I went to le depanneur across the street from the church, and asked if anyone worked at the church that I could speak to. The woman said she’d look up who it was, and took out a little booklet and told me the name of the woman who worked at the church. She then looked her up in the phonebook and called her. I heard her say (all this, of course done in French, me stuttering hopelessly in my five-year old French) that an English speaking woman was here looking for birth certificates of her grandmother, and she spoke only a little bit of French. this embarrassed me horribly. The woman got off the phone and said the woman would be there in a minute. Turns out, the woman who’s in charge lives on the next street over; which makes sense…the town is so very small. Within, literally, 3 minutes, she was there, and I was introduced to her, and when I started speaking to her in French, apologizing for my French, she said to the other woman, ‘well, she can speak French.’ I was vindicated. But, as time went on in the church, I imagine she changed her mind. I have about a 20 word vocabulary and can conjugate simply in the simple future, passé compose, or the present. and about 5 verbs.

Anyway, I showed the woman the date of my grandmother’s birth, and all at once, she went to a back room and came back with an ancient book with my grandmother’s ‘birth certificate,’ or, an entry, simply, in the book, saying that Yvonne Roux was born legitimately of Napolean Roux and Annie Beacotte, etc. It was amazing. And in the margins, was information about her marriages. Even her 2^nd marriage, which took place sometime when I was a teenager. This caused that bittersweet feeling – this entry was made not so long ago, well, well within my lifetime – I was a teenager – and how removed from this beautiful happening I was. Somewhere in a remote French speaking town of Quebec, perhaps 8 hours from where I was living, someone opened an ancient book of birth certificates and noted in the margins that my memere was now married, for the 2^nd time, to a Monsieur Raoul Lagarde, as St. Andre’s Church, where I went to school, and to Church hundreds, thousands of times. I was truly moved, and saddened by my removal from such phenomenon.

I took a picture of the certificate. The woman hesitated a bit, but not much. I then found the birth certificate of my one remaining aunt, and took a picture of that too. I can’t wait to show her.

I did all this very, very quickly. Like I said, this all was shadowed, eclipsed by this feeling of being torn away from the amazingly lovely St. Cuthbert. In fact, I had it in my mind that I was leaving tomorrow, because fine, I saw this, did it, and now I wanted to go spend a night at the beginning of the Gaspe peninsula. But then I thought, ‘are you crazy’? You traveled how far to get here? And it *is * a beautiful region. Fine, the people aren’t exactly like those in St. Cuthbert, the land isn’t either…but this is *amazing.* Truly. And the region is lovely. There are tons of amazing parks, and bike trails, and views, etc. I’m staying another night…or so I told the B&B owner on a scrap piece of paper I left for her on her table…that I hope she gets early enough in the morning before someone else takes my room.

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