return to Crespières, part 2 . . .

Ever since memory (at least in my adult life) when life crowds in on me, a voice inside echoes I want to go home!  And, ever since memory (at least in my adult life), I ask the voice inside and where is home?  I may go to my grave with that question still unanswered . . . and maybe find that answer, at last, on that other side . . .

But, every now and again this side of heaven, I sense what it must mean to be going . . . home?

August 4, 2010, was such a day.  There was the sign welcoming us to Crespières . . .  L’Eglise St. Martin with its familiar steeple, its locked door. . . The mairie with the marble plaque honoring its children, my great-grandfather among them . . .  The road—rue Moncel—beckoning me . . . home?

I walked ahead of the others.  Looking for redemption maybe?  Redemption is such a personal event, if it comes at all.

Many years ago—December 28, 1986 to be exact—I had walked this same road, this same quest for finding that elusive sense of home I so believe existed here. I had come to this moment and place in time so filled with hope, expecting . . . je ne sais quoi? . . . to be embraced as a long-lost child of that community? To recognize  . . . home?  I wasn’t.  I didn’t.

Something as trivial as struggling to explain, at the charcuterie, how my husband wanted our sandwich meat sliced . . . The young man behind the counter—how much he reminded me of my own brother—unable to contain his amusement at my broken attempt to communicate in his language . . .  I think the culinary outcome was other than what I had tried to communicate.  I think that what mattered most, though, was the breaking of my fragile spirit in that place, that moment in time. 

I stood across the street—rue du Grand Trou—that December afternoon, wondering which of two houses was the one of my not-quite-memory.  I had forgotten to bring the address.  I did not dare to ask . . .  Did not dare even to ask if my great-uncle Georges still lived in that village, if I might stop by to visit. 

At Orly, that New Year’s Day, I found his address in a telephone directory, wrote it down, wrote to him on my return.  This was his reply.

Nous aurions eu l’honneur de faire votre connaissance . . .

We would have been honored to meet you . . .

Nous esperons que votre voyage ce renouvellera . . .

We hope that this will make you want to return . . .

I did not understand the signature on the letter at that time: E. G. Ollivon.  My mother said his first name was Georges . . . and she did write to him after reading this letter . . .  It was only after visiting his grave this August—where he rests with his wife, Emilie—that I understood . . .

Georges was so very right.  I had no choice but to return . . .  home?

To be continued . . .

la cimetière a Crespières—le 28 décembre 1986

Searching for other old photos this afternoon and stumbled across these three, taken on my first visit to that cemetery, my first opportunity to visit my grandparents’ final resting place . . . 

So much has changed over time.  No need then for the grave rubbings, not that we yet knew to do that to preserve engravings worn away by time, the elements . . .  Victorine’s name is clear.  Yvonne’s tombstone still radiant—with the hyacinths we remembered to purchase at a local floriste, with the shells brought from South Carolina beaches to share with my grandmother who had once walked another Carolina’s beaches with me, who had gifted me with shells from her side of the Atlantic . . .



Those who know me well know why these flowers, why this shell . . .



I had one very special shell and two very special flowers with me when we visited Yvonne’s grave this August . . . discovered them days later, tucked safely away where they remain still . . .  Too caught up in the emotions of this visit, so very different from the last, that I did not remember their presence. 

Perhaps I was not meant to remember . . .

the Fourteenth Nome . . .

If the ancient Egyptians ruled our world today, Paris would be their Fourteenth Nome and, given my French heritage, I might be in some serious trouble at the moment—the moment being about 40% into Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid.

In my defense . . . who was it, really, who wrote her first “term paper” ever on Carter’s discovery of King Tutankhamen’s burial place, a discovery he made just two years before her mother was born in a village in France?  Who was it really, who waited in line one icy January morning, her youngest child in a stroller, to see the first ever American exhibit of Tut’s Tomb artifacts at the Smithsonian?  OK, so maybe she never made a point to visit l’Obelisque—aka Cleopatra’s Needle, the Obelisk of Luxor—during any time-over-a-lifetime in Paris . . .  And, yes, maybe she did make one of those pilgrimages during the demon days of late December, when she might have discovered a way into and, hopefully, out of the Duat . . .  But she meant well, she’s one of the innocents, she didn’t know about the magic . . .

. . . or the history.  Maybe it is more that . . . Place de La Concorde was, after all, home to the guillotine where so many lost their lives in the days of the Revolution . . .  When she was two, she played in the gardens at Versailles, where Marie Antoinette and her mother once played . . .  Why dwell on the ends of eras—of France with its King and Queen who lost their royal heads, both symbolic and real . . . of Egypt whose royal lineage expired with the legendary bite of an asp, ancient symbol of power over life and death . . . ?

OK, on her bucket list it is.! See Cleopatra’s Needle.  Not the ghosts of the guillotine and its victims (is taking the life of another ever justified?), not those troubled spirits.  Not Cleopatra’s ba . . . should it walk there.  But if there is indeed a portal to the underworld, doors that open to the untrained and the innocents on the demon days of December, she thinks she just might be able to find it, eternal believer in allthingspossible that she is . . .

In the meantime, she has uncovered digital and therefore indisputable (?) proof that, through the magic of her camera’s eye, she did indeed connect, from her top-of-the-Eiffel-Tower vantage point, with l’Obelisque on a not-so-long-ago balmy August afternoon . . .  

what we learned about grave rubbings, teamwork, and faith . . .

If my granddaddy-from-across-the-wide-Atlantic could forgive my throwing his hat out his second-story windows when I was two, hopefully he’ll be smiling from his vantage point in the afterworld at my at times somewhat-irreverent story here of our pilgrimage to his final resting place, that also of his parents . . .

And hopefully my genealogist daughter—on this side of heaven so I’ll be hearing or reading what she thinks—will forgive me too.

It’s hard being the resident expert.  Kimberly should know!  And she was our genealogist guru as we went cemetery-traipsing throughout France in August.  Our thoughts that day were about the flowers we had forgotten to bring as tributes to those gone before us.  We were not prepared to meet our ancestors’ more basic needs or to take away with us proof, beyond that which our cameras could capture, of their final imprints on this earth.

The cemetery was not as I had remembered.  The dense hedges that shrouded the feet of my grandparents and great-grandparents were absent from my mental sketches of our other visit to their graves more than twenty years ago. I feared that time had erased even these in perpetuity tombs, that the communal ossuary might have been their fate.

My memories, marked on the Google Earth map I carried, were time-warped . . .

We found them.

A days’-dead bird was Grandmaman Yvonne’s only tribute.  We had brought her fruit from her garden, gathered snail shells from the cemetery paths, pulled garlands of morning glories . . . We were there that day, just not in our own name but to honor Yvonne in her only daughter’s name, in the name of my mother who could not bring herself to make this painful journey back in time and memory. 

In one corner of the cemetery, as in many of the cemeteries we visited, there was water.  Albrecht, my son-in-law, offered his shirt as a scrubbing rag.  We scoured the black marble until it shone, offered Yvonne our small tokens and our gratitude, gratitude for her long-ago letting-go of her only child. Three of us there that August day—Kelsey, Kimberly, and I--walk this earth because of her selfless gift . . .

Finding the other grave--the vault where Granddaddy René and his parents, Victorine and Ernest, sleep—was not as easy.  Like so many in that cemetery, a lichen-streaked granite slab, only faint etchings remaining of the names of those interred beneath . . .

in perpetuity . . .

Ernest Theodore Ollivon gave his life for his country in the opening days of World War I.  His name is the first on the plaque at the mairie, the plaque memorializing the thirty children of Crespières mort pour la France (and the one disparu) so that their homeland might remain free.

 

The metal plaque marking his grave

has withstood the ravages of time, as has, to my utter amazement, the ceramic photograph of my grandfather, the last family member entombed in that family vault.  But not so the names and dates engraved in stone . . .  Did Victorine sleep there too?  So I believed but I had never known . . .

A grave rubbing would tell us.  Kimberly knew how, of course—this was her trade, her expertise.  But we were in another world, in a borrowed car, out of our element and unprepared.  I had a notepad, lined blue paper, pages to spare . . .  Lead in the pencils I always carried . . .  Slow going . . . until . . . Albrecht remembered . . . was it from long-ago Scouts learning he said?  Leaves—green, green leaves and this was August—might work.

And they did!

What those that come after us will see in these photos, I believe, is not so much the names of the dead but the hands of the living . . .