With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to singer-songwriter Klô Pelgag.
The grass is high. The river lends its scent to forget-me-nots and dandelions, the tide fluctuates according to the time of the seasons. We are at the beginning of summer in the Bas-Saint-Laurent. Three generations of girls are going to open a house that is dear to them. A house of memories with the traces of those who lived there. Always there, a child’s hat as a precious vestige that spans the ages. It’s my great-uncle’s.
Wearing his hat, he ran past the Jesuits’ house, his metal pistol in his hand. He sold pies by the railroad with his aunt, cried with bleeding knees on Anse-des-Mercier, walked among the corpses of capelin washed up on the beach and read Nelligan on the pages dewy by sunset. sun.
We wash the windows of this house as if we were polishing diamonds. It is through this window that our ancestors sent their hands, wiped away their tears, through this window they hoped for the end of winter and the arrival of the forget-me-nots.
Through a window I can see the quay which lost its railway a long time ago; his old face. I see it in the large frame near my bedroom door. The one that contains photos of all versions of our house from 1870 to 1985; we would be ripe to add one.
My great-uncle Lionel appears on one of them, he is upright and proud. He must have put away his hat a long time ago, not suspecting that the next person to wear it would be me. Me to whom, one day, he will offer a book by Émile Nelligan. Me he scared. I dreaded the moment when I would have to play at the “Piton” in his team, under the insistent and nervous gaze of my grandmother, who I guessed was praying inwardly so that I would get a “5” and so that the team of my uncle (mine) has a chance of winning.
In turn, I was reminded how to roll the dice. There was surely something wrong with me that I never managed to bring up the right number, the one that would free my pawns and allow me to enter the game. I had to take a break to cry in the bathroom before returning to suffer the game until its end. In the end, I never managed to get this 5 so much hoped for, but I knew how to take the sighs following each of my defeats. I think about this story while installing the mosquito nets and it wakes up the flies which thaw like my memories. It’s all over the bedspread. I almost believed in a pattern on the fabric.
With my daughter, I eat smoked eel and I breathe this charged air, which, at times, is painfully inspired. I think of the day when my parents took over my great-uncle’s house, I felt like I was finally seeing them realize a dream. I saw gestures heavy with meaning; my father repair with respect, my mother decorate with love. I think of the evening when we turned on all the lights in the house before going outside to contemplate it. It is, for me, a moment of life without wounds. A rare moment of happiness shared with my family.
My mother went to visit my father in the cemetery, I visited him with the howl of a goose. I often visit him in the places where we have been together, in the things that I know have been important to him. What would he think of us today? Would he be disappointed to see that the knots are still visible or would he be proud to see that we are getting through it?
I’m on the beach, in front of the Jesuits’ house. I watch the water obey the wind, the waves seek their way to shore. They smash like a thousand curtains a second, flooding the nests of crustaceans. It is a spectacle, a magnificent disaster. This cold water does me violence as much as I love it. It cuts my breath, numbs my body, it is a test that I look forward to from May to September.
But things are changing. Twice I’ve been threatened to call the police after a swim. Are the new rich who buy the chalets on the banks of the St. Lawrence afraid of the girls of the river? Mad women screaming in pain in the wind that carries their cries? The river is the only one that has an acquired right. And nature is stronger than a “no parking” sign. Sooner or later, this little dirt road will be washed away by the sea and will carry with it the arid dreams of those who dispossess us.
I found a photo in an old metal coffee can. The photo is dark, underexposed, it’s a Polaroid from before the return of the Polaroid. I wear my great-uncle Lionel’s hat there. His scout hat with a leather strap and an iron star. I’m recording my first album in the local church. I look down, my head in profile. I must have been trying very hard to be happy. Did I get there? It was ten years ago. Many things have changed, but the gestures remain the same at the beginning of the summer. The flies are thawing, the windows are dirty, and the carpet of forget-me-nots always brings me back to this doorstep.