We left me (rightly or wrongly) feeling sad, uncomfortable, and lonely in my garret room in Quebec. And the next day, quite frankly, was a hard one too. Daisy and I went to the store and bought some laundry baskets and a clothes rack and other items for the house. It was nerve-wracking to drive the unfamiliar roads, even with a navigator. My shoulders ached with the tension of it. And then when we got home, I spent hour after hour trying to find some more permanent place for us to park.
You must understand, this was not my first attempt. Ever since we found this house last winter, I had been scouring the internet for parking options. I'd asked the owner of our house and my Quebecois friend on the French conversation practice app I'd been using. I'd emailed parking companies large and small. I'd even found an outdoor lot that seemed promising, but there was a waiting list to buy a monthly space there. I put us on the waiting list and then just had to hope that when we got here, some option would become clear! I thought that surely if we could just walk around and SEE what was available and how far was a reasonable walking distance, we'd be able to work something out.
What we found was that the streets around our house are all narrow and one-way and completely packed with parked cars at all hours. There are several steep hills. If you can find a spot, you are allowed to park for one hour, but no longer. So as things stood, once we arrived at the house and whenever we were at home, Sam was setting a timer and going out to move the car and hunt for a new place every hour! And then he was parallel-parking in the tiniest and most nerve-wracking places. It definitely did not seem sustainable. But getting a resident parking permit, I learned after much effort, was impossible for us because we would be here less than six months. There are several parking garages around by hotels and other large buildings, but none of them had high enough clearance for our seven-foot-high van. (One garage said it had a height of 2.1 meters. 7 feet is 2.13 meters…we didn't dare try it.) We walked around taking pictures of signs that might have a phone number where someone could help us, but I was already having to learn new French words for half of these topics, and when I got talking to someone who was throwing around French bureaucrat-speak like "resident use permit" or "adequate utility documentation" I got hopelessly lost. One guy got so fed up with my confusion on the phone that he just hung up on me!
I felt so overwhelmed and out of my depth. I felt like it had been a huge mistake to assume I could figure out how to do anything in French, let alone this (surprisingly) complicated thing, and the whole unbearable weight of it seemed to rest on my shoulders since it had been me that got us here and was only me that had even a chance of communicating with anyone about it!
And it was so, so, so hot, inside and out. And the milk, as we have established, was IN BAGS.
That night after making so many futile calls and searching so many futile websites, I smelled dinner cooking somewhere, and realized it was almost 8 pm and all the kids were probably starving. So I went sadly down to the kitchen to see what I could throw together, and Daisy and Junie had made dinner! (I wrote about it here but it bears repeating!) I felt the great, overwhelming weight of everything lift just a little at that. So that was the first good thing.
And I had found another little fridge in the pantry. Just a mini size, but combined with the other fridge, I thought maybe we could actually fit enough food to feed us…not for a whole week perhaps. But for several nights at a time. (I do not know what Clementine's expression here means.)
On the third day we decided to go visit Chute-Montmorency (a beautiful waterfall nearby) and the lady at the ticket office let us in at the "residents" price (free) when we showed our long-term-rental documents. And then we walked by the waterfall and there was a huge cloud of fine mist that filled the air for hundreds of feet around. It was soft and delicate, but after a minute of standing in it, we were completely soaked! And it felt SO good! It was the first time I had felt cool enough since we'd arrived in Quebec.
We stood there as long as we could stand it, savoring the feel of the cool air and the cool water. We walked away for a while and then came back and let the spray soak us again! I thought, "If all else fails, we can come here every day." That was a hopeful thought. And that was a third good thing.
For dinner that night we decided to try to find some poutine. We know and love poutine already; it's been in my cooking repertoire since my brother Karl came home from his mission to Montreal in the 1990s, and we've eaten it when visiting Rachael and Thierry. If you haven't had it (how sad!), it is simply a mix of French fries and cheese curds and gravy. But if done correctly, those three ingredients are absolutely magical together! And Quebec is where poutine was invented; the poutine Mecca, if you will. So we had high hopes of it.
And…those hopes were realized. This was the first poutine we ate in Quebec and it already lived up to all my wildest dreams. I immediately began to think of ways to somehow increase our poutine budget, or at least to acquire a poutine budget. :) Everyone seemed a little brighter and happier once they were full of poutine.
So that was another good thing.
Then, at the store, Daisy and I discovered these "milk pitchers," which even if they are just another way Big Milk is squeezing money from helpless customers (kidding; I just wanted to use the term "Big Milk")—seemed geared to solve at least one of the problems bagged milk introduces: how on earth to drink it!! (I have since learned there are racks that hold the bags in the fridge too. Another contrivance of the Milk-Industrial Complex!)
First we tried cutting the bags open and pouring them into the pitchers. But that was still pretty awkward, and unbelievably, the milk from the bag didn't even all FIT in the pitcher! What? But then we discovered you can put the whole bag in the pitcher and cut off the corner. And that works moderately well. And so Bagged Milk and I came to an uneasy peace.
All through those days the little blessings just kept piling up, each a little bright point of light amid the dimness of unfamiliarity and alienness.
Junie's loft, far from being too hot, turned out to be one of the cutest places in the house. The fan cooled it nicely, and she was so happy to have her own little "room" instead of being squished in with someone else. I loved seeing her up there reading or hearing her giggling with Daisy or Junie.
Daisy was just as happy with her and Clementine's room. She put up her picture of Jesus and her lists of spiritual gifts she's trying to develop. She organized her chest of drawers. She hung her clothes in rainbow order. And she got to look out at this view from her bed and her little desk:
Junie being in the loft meant Sam and I could have both beds in the garret room I loved. As they were both tiny (we slept in a Queen-size bed for years and it was fine, but sleeping in a Double bed after being used to a King gave me an uneasy feeling of being about to topple off the edge all night long), we pushed them together and had one rather strange and uneven huge bed with a crack in the middle instead. It was better!
Gus loved his little window and could be found gazing out it at all times of day (especially at bedtime when he should have been sleeping). I would go out on my balcony for some air and see his little happy face peeking over at me. It was darling.
We still couldn't fit a week's worth of milk in the fridge. But we found this wonderful little market only two blocks away, close enough to send any of the kids to. It was almost more convenient than having a week's worth of milk, because I found myself running up there multiple times a week anyway for little groceries I'd forgotten.
And the parking—the awful insurmountable parking problem. After a few days, when I was weeping over all the dead ends in my search, Sam said, "You know, it's not really that bad. I like taking a little break from work every hour. It gets me out of the house and clears my head. It's helping me know the neighborhood better." I could see he really meant it. Often he would take one of the kids with him and have a little walk and talk with them. Usually there was an empty spot within a few blocks. We could leave the van in place before 10 am and after 6 pm, so once we settled in for the night we could stay in. Saturdays and Sundays didn't have parking restrictions either. And it turned out that I was off at the store, or we were away doing things as a family, a lot of the time anyway. Every once in a while the spot right in front of the house would open up and we would all rejoice! But if not, we'd stop in the street and an army of children would hastily unload the groceries or get the little ones into the house while we hoped no other cars would come up behind us and get impatient, and then we'd just drive on and park wherever we could. It was not what we'd wanted. But it was fine.
And every time I came back from the store or from moving the car or from a walk, there was a line of dear little heads watching for me from the windows.
One evening I was sitting outside trying to catch some hint of a breeze in the hot, humid air. Sam had made me a root beer float, but the root beer had been sitting too close to the back of the fridge, so it had frozen (a thing that happens strangely often in our poor little fridge) and turned into a sort of slush. It was absolutely the most wonderful thing I had ever tasted.
I realized suddenly as I sat there that the ache in my chest and the hollow pit in my stomach were gone. I loved this view and I loved this this balcony. And as I thought about the week behind me, all those little points of light from the last few days seemed to blend together into one unbroken bright line of God's love and goodness, a line stretching all the way back as far as I could see, a line that had been there to hold onto even in the moments I couldn't see it.
Even as I'm writing this now, remembering it, I can imagine that line of the Lord's tender mercies arcing over us, so bright in hindsight that maybe someone might read these posts about Quebec [I've got a lot coming up, too; prepare yourself] and not know there was anything else. That person might think, "How did everything work out so perfectly, with not a single need unaccounted for? How could they have found such an ideal situation and such perfectly-tailored experiences—while meanwhile here I am in the dim messy confusion of my own life?"
But I hope instead that such a person—whether she is me in the future or one of my children or someone who doesn't know me at all—will see in this writing how much God loves His children. How he sends not just occasional sparks of goodness, but a constant stream of it—a stream which only appears intermittent because of the encompassing human dimness that covers our eyes between flashes of light. And when we look back with clearer eyes, we will see the bright cords reaching as far as we can see in both directions, pulling us always, always, beautifully back to Him.
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