Like most city dwellers, I am always a little lacking in nature, a vampire of chlorophyll, of a still lake and satin air. At a dinner with friends the other night, I joked that the money for my cottage had gone into the foundations and walls that hold my house up. I sometimes wonder why we don’t have the reflex to get together and share the purchase of a cottage.
Another guest introduced the question of old age into the discussion. Where would we like to spend it? Of course the prospect of a pretty house on the banks of the river, a field or a valley is tempting. But does it pass the test of the depression of a little Tuesday in February? To break it, I can go see a film at the Cinéma Beaubien (not a blockbuster), then on a whim, turn off to the Tibetan restaurant to devour a plate of momos. All this for not much money, while wandering around my city, much prettier in the snow. I’ll catch the bus or the subway on the way back – no need for a car, or to plan everything in advance. With my light therapy lamp and these little impromptu trips, yes, I can endure winter. Would the sumptuous silent cinema of a snowy country valley in front of the curtain of night falling at 4 p.m. be enough to satisfy the overstimulated urbanite that I am?
Like the singer of Comment Debord, “I would have loved it so much / For my parents to have a cottage / On the edge of something.” But in the meantime, ten minutes from home, on the other side of Pie-IX Boulevard, there are the green lungs of Rosemont, this double space made up of Maisonneuve Park and its flowery neighbor, the Botanical Garden, which took me far too long to tame — it was the pandemic that unstuck me.
Before going there, I wrongly believed that the Garden was about people cramming into a damp, overheated greenhouse to admire cacti and butterflies. I had not yet discovered the open-air backdrop of this waking dream, a surreal garden of improbable flowers, inhabited by ducks, frogs, turtles, and foxes. And I haven’t even told you about the sheep I’ve been looking after for four years at Repaire de Biquette. In winter, when they go back to the farm, I sometimes go skiing around the sheepfold. The white of the snow against the creamy-golden white of their wool… For me, the soul of Parc Maisonneuve is this flock of twenty ewes, rams, ewe lambs and lambs that came back last week. What a joy to find them all fat and frilly.
Last Saturday, it was raining gently. Maya and I put on our raincoats and hats and went to the Botanical Garden anyway, since when it rains, we pretty much have it all to ourselves. Little insider tip: you have to enter through the back door on Rosemont, near 29e Avenue, not on Sherbrooke, that’s where the magic is hidden. For two hours, we forget everything. The time that passes, our cell phones, the noises of the city, our obligations and other annoyances. Suddenly, we pass through the looking glass, we plunge into the green.
In a pond, alone and imperial, a young heron lets the rain caress its plumage. This heron is my father winking at me. When he left us two years ago, I went to take refuge in the garden. That time, an owl brushed past me as it took flight. The memory of my father is sheltered under the wings of the great birds of the Garden.
A little further on, geese are lazing near a stretch of water carpeted with water lilies at their tops. On a clump of yellow flowers, a cardinal sings and hops, bright and scarlet. In the First Nations Garden, the sunflowers have bloomed, but it is a bud still green with tender petals turned against its heart that captures our attention. I call it The promisebecause in this flower there is a poem.
We enter a small enclave to admire a tree with arms like snakes up close, while a plant with large umbrella leaves sweeps our calves. A little further on, a yellow and red spike looks like a Popsicle. We marvel at popcorn-colored irises and a purple pompom that bursts like fireworks: a Persian star, AmaryllidaceaeThe real name of the flowers is written on discreet plaques.
As our walk draws to a close, we talk again about this fantasy of a return to the land and Josée Blanchette’s recent column on her migration to Saint-Charmant which ended, a few years later, after the shock of reality, with a return to the city. It happens that the little house at the end of the row is not the dream place that we thought it was, it is a point of view that we are given less often to read.
I think back to this story by the wonderful American short story writer Shirley Jackson, Vacationers. A bourgeois couple decides to extend their usual summer stay at the country house until autumn. They gradually realise – too late, however – that the friendly locals do not tolerate city dwellers and other neo-rurals for more than three months a year. They do not blend into the bucolic landscape that desires them…
A flash of red interrupts us: a young, tall fox running past, stretching each stride to its maximum length. My friend Élise Turcotte, a writer and animal lover, is sorry she never sees him. To make the fox appear, there are two strategies: 1) Don’t think about him (because he prefers to surprise and dazzle) 2) Dedicate a poem or a novel to him.
The duty invited its readers to talk about their favorite parks and I can’t wait to wander through your words to discover the secrets of your corners of paradise. No, I don’t have a cottage “on the edge of something”, but ten minutes from my house, there is this lake of greenery and teeming life from which I always leave feeling soothed, with a light heart. One certainty: I would miss my park if I ever left the city.