return to Crespières, part 3

So out of sequence this story is . . . perhaps because the past must have its space and time and voice before the gate to the present and, perhaps, the future opens . . .

Some of this return to Crespières was about recreating, about reenacting, about posing, as Yvonne had done, for the camera's eye. 

Mama has told me often how her grandmother's home was in the village and the gardens on the outskirts of town.  Yvonne's wedding day family photo was taken in front of a huge stone building--a barn of sorts but one so sturdy that it might last forever.  In our search for a castle--the one in whose gardens flowers once spelled   Gisèle (and so my mother was named)--we came across a massive stone structure.  Not quite the same doorway structure but, in the almost ninety

intervening years, might this too have been altered?

My favorite will be Yvonne in her garden at her home on Rue du Grand Trou (numéro 8), my posing in her honor where she once posed (I was there that day but too young to hold on to the memory) that I might have this caughtonfilm memory of her decades later.