With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us, in turn, their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to Alexandre Barrette.
Posted on March 20
Very hot weekend for early March.
Summer is like Rocky Balboa. Every time you think it’s over, he always manages to come back.
This fight between winter and summer, which seems to have been going on forever, will never produce a definitive winner.
As much as I sometimes find the harshness and assaults of winter difficult, it breaks my heart to see the snow melting. I am developing the Stockholm complex for this season.
As Michel Rivard sings in the song I loved winter (my mother’s favorite song in Michel Rivard’s repertoire), “white snow is ephemeral”.
The version magnified by the Orchester symphonique de Montréal is simply an auditory nectar.
Aside from the ecological worries that heighten my grief over winter’s hasty death, ever since I was young I’ve never found it easy to watch winter end.
Just as I find it difficult to see the summer end.
I can have a hard time going through loving bereavements. I find it hard to mourn a season.
Today, despite the sadness of seeing the snow lose the fight, I decided to go for a walk in my neighborhood.
At the end of my street, there is a small path of about a kilometer which runs along a municipal golf course and which attracts walkers and joggers in all seasons.
I often borrow it as a jogger; today I take it as a walker.
Contrary to the sky which is soft and beautiful, the path is inclement today. The mild weather has sweated the white aisle and transformed it into the second class corridor of the titanic40 minutes after impact.
Few walkers venture there.
Between two moments when I have my head down to make sure I’m not stepping in a puddle of water, I see in the distance, in the opposite direction, a wheelchair with, behind, a person pushing it.
The closer I get, the clearer the two silhouettes, the seated one and the standing one, like a higher row of letters on the board at the optometrist.
Arrived at a few meters, I see them more precisely. In the armchair, I see an elderly lady, sheltered by a woolen blanket. Blue eyes that defy age. Very beautiful. And standing behind, a not very tall man, who seems to force a lot to move the chair forward.
I imagine it’s a couple and I estimate their age at around 80 winter’s mourning.
The man seems to be struggling to push the chair.
It’s a little burlesque, but above all touching.
I offer my help: “Sir, can I help push you to where you want to go? »
Despite the shortness of breath, the man replies: “We have nowhere to go, I just wanted to take my wife for a walk before bringing her back to the centre. She really likes this trail. »
Silence.
I try to answer. Silence that returns as a reminder.
His sentence, about twenty words, 10 seconds, struck me as much as a Radiohead record.
Without warning, the melting snow now has the audacity to attack my eyes.
How can this man, in one sentence, make my eyes water?
I think he made me imagine true love in one sentence. Like in the movie Mommyby Xavier Dolan, in the scene where we see successively the main character’s defining moments, in a fictional journey where his life would have been well, punctuated by the charged music of Ludovico Einaudi (one of the beautiful scenes of cinema in my very humble opinion).
A bit like in this scene, I saw the highlights of this couple go by quickly. I imagined their love at first sight 60 years ago. Their shyness which slowly turns into the comfort of being together.
I saw their giggles, their quibbles, their concessions, their complicity, their devotion to each other, the way in which they, each at different times, gave priority to the other from time to time. Their way of reassuring themselves. Their way of always staying.
Finally, the way of this man of wanting to offer this walk to his wife despite the uncooperative ground. There’s no rational reason to push a wheelchair down a slush trail when you’re 80. There can only be love.
Love, fuel for irrational beauties.
I continued my walk, letting this couple be.
I turned around twice to look at him.
It is 11 p.m., the sun has given its prey a respite. The snowbanks can rest a little and hope that the melting truce will last.
I can’t say the same about my eyes, which are still watery thinking about this couple.