The sneaky little pang of guilt that comes with betrayal has left me bruised all over for the past month. First, my uncle left with the beggar’s bench and the rocking chair of “Mam”, the one who had traveled on the roof of my father’s blue Beetle, from Cap-des-Rosiers to Rosemont. Not the great-grandmother, the lullaby! The long bench, ancestor of the sofa bed, has accompanied the sore buttocks of several generations. I parted ways with no qualms, but with bruises everywhere. You don’t break a house without a few bruises remaining.
— Look, Uncle Jacques! Still has the original oxblood dye on the back and inside.
I couldn’t have sold these two pieces, too much history accompanied them, that of the beggars, peddlers of news, too many memories of cradled children too. The future does not belong to me, neither does the past. I am a passer, a passer-by moved by oblivion.
I have dumped everything left and right (especially left) for a month, and realized once again that our antiques are not worth a penny, hardly find buyers, except among a few nostalgic people who sniff linseed oil and anoint their knuckles with beeswax. Stéphan paid me $75 for my pretty pine jam maker, a piece at least 150 years old which I used as an expense (of pantry, my grandfather Alban would have said) and shelter for my plum or apricot jams. We used to store canned goods there, reserves for the winter. He also bought me my big chocolate brown pine wardrobe, an elegant one that appealed to him. I didn’t even negotiate, defeated.
The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual
Stéphan Grondin, 64, retired from TVA a few years ago and he collects antiques in his Montérégie country garage, refinishes them, gives them a coat of love and resells them… or keeps them. “My girlfriend decides if it stays. She doesn’t want to live in a museum. » I toured his decaying kingdom last fall, left with an oblong rattan shelf and two old chairs with bars that he gave me.
This friendly valorist combs auctions, library and presbytery closings, collects everything, lamps, chairs, chiffoniers, hunting bait. It repairs the irreparable outrage for years.
Wooden tongue, melamine memory
“I had a history teacher who said: when you don’t have roots, you float in your boots,” recalls Stéphan, who has been ogling antiques since the 1980s on Île d’Orléans.
Denys Arcand would approve; the filmmaker has just spread a layer of matte white latex on the heritage reviewed and corrected in his stripper Will, a period film, ours. Even the books from the RPA library where Jean-Michel, brilliantly played by Rémy Girard, resides, go to the recycling center, “to make wrapping paper,” quips the director of the residence (Sophie Lorain). Arcand does not spare the language of wood and our heritage of laminated melamine. An Alzheimer’s society of “I remember”.
All these people who empty their houses and call the cemetery 1-800-Got-Junk?, all these old furniture sent to palliative care at the ecocenter while the Ikea parking lot overflows on Sundays, all these traces of life, these ways of doing things, these ancient gestures (rustic? primitive?) combined with a profession, the bread bin, the wooden cooler, the stand and its glass pints of milk (my B kept them and was entitled to the “ when I was little, the milkman passed by…”), all our cultural heritage jettisoned.
Ironically, it is often new arrivals, immigrants and refugees, who inherit old furniture worn out by time, without an instruction manual.
It is a false two-body pantry cabinet in polychrome solid wood, with hollow panels, 19th century. The colors are original.
In his novel Obsolete, Alexandra Gilbert tells the story of Marie, who must liquidate her deceased father’s collection of Quebec antiques. An obstacle course, an archivist. “It’s important to feel that there is a legacy, from human to human,” mentions the 48-year-old heritage worker. Material heritage bears an imprint, that of memory. Language is threatened, but so are objects; they end up in the sorting center, the historical societies are overflowing. Antiques were made for the needs of another era. »
She herself has kept the refectory table from her father, a still-living restorer of old houses. “I found a Bélanger stove repairer for my wood stove, capable of repairing it. Our heritage now rests on the shoulders of a few individuals. One generation and it’s over. It’s a heartbreaker. » Alexandra adds “ultimately, it’s like fostering an elderly parent”. More delicate than you think…
Over time
Last Sunday, I left the two wicker-bottomed rabbit-eared chairs that my father was proud of in front of the antique dealer Au fil du temps, in Frelighsburg, an ROA, a residence for elderly objects. I had brought a few other trinkets, a salt box, a pipe rack, a silver nail polisher. Suzanne Dubé guards the fort, surrounded by a menagerie of porcelain, objects to dust, old posters and old portraits, treasure chests. This enthusiast of patinated objects is not about to hang up her skates: “It keeps me alive! »
She and her husband have been brewing dust for over 40 years in their two stores in the Cantons. Everything touches me in these places where time has taken a break. I imbue myself with a slowness that we lack.
“We need transmission, to know that it will go into the right hands. I don’t just sell, I tell the story behind the object, it lives on. It doesn’t have to end at auction. »
And to tell me where that Pigeon Hill cabinet and the portrait next to it came from. “We must protect our heritage. We pollute the planet with new objects. Turning to antiques is also a way of recovering and reusing. » She points to my English tureen: “Some people will tell me, there are cracks on the tureen. And I tell them that this is what makes up his soul. I’m 65 years old, and I have cracks too…”
It doesn’t deserve the dump.