Perhaps you are all thoroughly tired of Quebec posts, but I persist! This is the last one, I think: a little collection of details about the house and city, which we can read and smile at when we are old and grey. (Not so far off.) I think the kids will like remembering these things someday.
1. About the shape and character of the city:
Not one building on the rock was on the same level with any other, and two hundred feet below them all was the Lower Town, crowded along the narrow strip of beach between the river's edge and the perpendicular face of the cliff. The Lower Town was so directly underneath the Upper Town that one could stand on the terrace of the Château Saint-Louis and throw a stone down into the narrow streets below.These heavy grey buildings, monasteries and churches, steep-pitched and dormered, with spires and slated roofs, were roughly Norman Gothic in effect. They were made by people from the north of France who knew no other way of building. The settlement looked like something cut off from one of the ruder towns of Normandy or Brittany, and brought over. It was indeed a rude beginning of a "new France," of a Saint-Malo or Rouen or Dieppe, anchored here in the ever-changing northern light and weather. At its feet, curving about its base, flowed the mighty St. Lawrence, rolling north toward the purple line of the Laurentian mountains, toward frowning Cap Tourmente which rose dark against the soft blue of the October sky. The ile d'Orléans, out in the middle of the river, was like a hilly map, with downs and fields and pastures lying in folds above the naked tree-tops.
It's interesting that she mentions Saint-Malo in France—that's one of the towns from which ships often set sail to Quebec. We've actually been there, and it does remind me of Quebec City—kind of craggy and windy and wild, although built along ocean coast instead of river coast.
Old pictures of Quebec. Such a rocky cliff-side city! The lower town crowded in next to the river and the upper town looming over it.
And it's still like that now! (picture from here)
Lower town nestling against the cliff
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2. Leeks, for some reason, were bigger and more beautiful in Quebec than I have ever seen them in the States. I like leeks (Abe has requested leek soup for his birthday dinner since he was a little boy) so I was always remarking on them at the store. The other thing I loved, and now miss so much? Huge bunches of fresh dill in the produce section! In Utah you can buy a couple scrawny strands of fresh dill in a teeny little container for about $4.99, but in Quebec there were enormous bundles of it next to the parsley and cilantro. I loved it and put it in everything I cooked, and now I am suffering from dill-withdrawal. :(
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Oh yes, and I also miss this concentrated bouillon I could get in Quebec. It is liquid and I find it so much easier to use than "Better than Bouillon" (which is what I use in Utah), and it tastes amazing in things. I brought several of these bottles home, chicken and beef flavored, but it is only a matter of time till they are GONE, gone forever.
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3. This description that Sam wrote in a letter to his parents early on when we were in Quebec. Although it was a first impression, it captures something true:
I had heard that a Quebecois accent is just French as people spoke it 400 years ago. And in a way, that is what I see the Quebecois people like also: their appearance, mannerisms, attitude, and quickness to revolt against what they deem unfair use of power, all make it easy to imagine the people who settled here 400 years ago. They are not so much French as they are proto-French, perhaps the originals. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are like French cavemen, but if there was a gradient between modern Parisian being red, and le Néandertal as yellow, then the Quebecois might be somewhere in the red-oranges. This impression might be aided by the northern climate; giving successive generations of Quebec French bushier brows, sturdier limbs, and a hardened look that reminds me of the people that scowled at us with equal distrust in Moscow.
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4. The houses in Quebec, especially in the countryside, were so neat and well-kept. I noticed it immediately when we crossed the border from Maine, and I kept thinking, "Maybe it's just confirmation bias. Maybe I had that thought and now I just keep noticing only the things that support it." But the impression persisted throughout all our months there, even when I looked for evidence to the contrary. I think I saw a total of about 3 houses or yards in Quebec that looked unkempt in all those months. In Maine, they were everywhere! (No offense to Mainers. There were many beautiful houses too! But lots of junky yards, weedy, porches falling apart, siding falling off, etc. And I assumed it was because (a.) house upkeep is expensive and (b.) the humidity and harsh winters are really hard on houses! But the same is true in Quebec and somehow they adapt to it, apparently!) The smallest and least assuming houses were still beautifully maintained, each with a well-tended flower garden or window boxes, window frames painted, plants neatly trimmed, weeds pulled. We often saw people out in their yards, sweeping off their porches, working in their gardens, repairing their siding. (Again, I know. People do this everywhere. I guess it just seemed more common in Quebec.) Every time we drove anywhere I loved looking out at the towns and villages, just enjoying how picturesque and pleasant everything looked.
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5. In many parts of the city, instead of mirroring the green light for cars, the pedestrian "walk" signals turned on at the same time for both directions. Meaning: the north/southbound traffic had a green. Then the est/ouest traffic had a green. Then all the pedestrians had a walk signal at once. This often led people to cut across the intersection diagonally rather than making a right angle. This probably happens in other cities all the time, but now I associate it with Quebec—hurrying diagonally through an empty intersection while all the cars wait for you. As a pedestrian it was kind of fun; as a driver it was annoying (not the diagonal cutting, just the traffic pattern) because you had to wait so much extra time at lights!
On less busy streets, the "walk" signals stayed with the direction of traffic, but they would stay on soooo long. The signal would flash "95" or "75" seconds sometimes on these little tiny streets, a ridiculously long amount of time for crossing thirty feet. On Rue Saint-Jean absolutely no pedestrian waited that long, but would dart across the road contrary to the light any time there was a break in traffic. We did this too, I'm sorry to say. Traffic is one way anyway on that road, so it is easy to find gaps.
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6. So many little things to remember about the house:
• The bathroom doors with hook-and-eye latches (which the littlest kids couldn't reach). It was kind of fun to flick up the hook with your finger and try to get it to land exactly in the eye. In the downstairs bathroom, you had to latch two latches because there were two doors, one from the dining room and one from the living room.
• The three-bar swing-out towel rack in the downstairs bathroom (which unsurprisingly, I never took a picture of, but it looked like this one) which was always, always swung out from the wall (rather than tucked neatly against it as it should have been). I fixed it every time I went in there. Somehow it always got pulled out again. And the towels never stayed nicely hung on it, either.
• The garlic sitting in a big mug by the stove. It was there when we came and as I bought new garlic, I just kept putting it there. I keep garlic in the fridge back in Utah, but there was something nice about just having it right out there to cook with!
• This weird plugged hole in the dining room, whatever it was. Maybe a pipe used to be there? There were lots of things like that in this house.
Here's another one—I always liked to imagine that this cover was a spray-painted paper plate some kid made, even though it wasn't actually made of paper. It was covering some vent in the chimney. There must have been a fireplace all the way downstairs in the other people's house? Because it didn't lead to a fireplace for us.
See? A gold-painted paper plate.
• The way the walls weren't quite straight. You didn't notice it until you swept the floor and then it was pretty obvious that one wall was at a slight diagonal rather than perpendicular to the other side of the room. It didn't seem to go at a right angle up from the floor, either, but leaned a little.
• In the wood floors, here were little holes in the floorboards in some spots, or random nail heads sticking up (there was a nasty one in Teddy's room that kept scraping people's knees when they were playing. I think Sam ended up hammering it in with a screwdriver).
• The way your feet always felt slightly grimy and crumb-y. The gaps between the floorboards harbored dust and dirt, I guess, and even though we swept the floor a lot (and vacuumed with the weird central vacuum, which didn't always work)—our feet were pretty much always black from dirt if we walked around barefoot.
• The creaking board that ran right along the middle of the upstairs hall. The time one noticed it most was in the middle of the night, when it seemed to groan loud enough to wake the dead! Especially when we had visitors. It was so long and creaking that one couldn't avoid it completely, but I, at least, got pretty good at a complicated dance on and off it in key spots to minimize noise at night. Kind of like the way you walk to conceal your footsteps from the sandworms in "Dune"…
• Daisy and Clementine's bedroom door also made the most awful scraping noise if you closed it all the way. Usually Daisy didn't bother to close it tight, but when we had visitors, they stayed in that bedroom, and the scraping noise rang through the house worst of all when anyone was trying to quietly sneak in and out without bothering anyone!
• The beautifully ornate doorknobs. They remind of the doorknobs people always take pictures of their hands on when they get married in the Salt Lake Temple! This one led to the stairs that went down to the outside entrance. I was always happy to put my hand on the other side of this because it meant I was home and up the first set of stairs!
• Speaking of stairs, they were so steep! It always took a bit of gearing-up to get up them, and I usually went down one at a time, putting both feet on each stair, which took forever and people would get impatient walking behind me—but it led to me being the only one of us that didn't fall down the stairs at some point during our stay! Some of the kids fell multiple times, and it made such a horrifying noise! Every time I was upstairs and walked past the stairs at night, going to the bathroom or to say goodnight to one of the kids, I had a vision of myself somehow just stumbling to the side a little and tumbling down them in the dark. They were just so steep. It was like walking by a ladder, and it made me nervous every time! It didn't help that the rug along the hallway up there would get bumped up or shifted off its non-slip pad, and then you'd feel your feet slip terrifyingly when you stepped onto it.
• Zig and Gus always wanted to play things on the stairs no matter how many times we told them not to. They would get curtain ties and tie them across the stairs to make their "cruise ship" or "ferry" or whatever else.
• The sides of the stairs, next to the carpet runner, always looked dusty, even right after we vacuumed them. I noticed that because I usually went up the stairs on all fours, using my hands and my feet, like an animal (or like you'd go up a ladder). They were steep enough that that felt comfortable!
• I loved the finial at the bottom of the stairs. When it didn't have one of Ziggy's ropes tied to it, or someone's jacket hanging over it, it looked so pretty!
• This funny long succulent (I don't think it was aloe, but looked kind of like it) which was so tall it eventually just had to fall over on the range hood.
• Malachi's feet were visible like this on his bed whenever I came in his door to call him for something. (Or when Clementine came in to give him one of her gnome drawings.) He did have that desk, which I saw him at occasionally too. And some board game all laid out nicely there on a towel.
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• These beams in our room, on which Sam and I banged our heads and shoulders periodically. It hurt SO much.
• There was also this little raised tile hearth on which I stubbed my toe nearly every single time I stepped in from the balcony. To be fair, this was often in the dark, but also (to be fair in the other direction), what was I doing always setting off across the room on a slant like that?
• This big plant, which I was positive we'd manage to kill before we left this house! Somehow it survived! But it did get really unsteady and start leaning, at which point we brilliantly propped it up with a tomato can. It worked pretty well and is still there to this day…I like to think. (I will probably never know. How sad!)
• This unused high chair in the pantry (how do we not have a child young enough to use a high chair anymore?!), stuffed in next to the water heater, stacked with reusable bags.
• Speaking of the little pantry, I liked these wall spice racks and all the yellow packets of "Sans Nom" ("No Name") brand spices. The floor of the pantry was usually damp and sometimes outright wet, due to the water that was always leaking from under the bottom drawer of the little fridge. I'm so glad we had that tiny fridge in addition to our other slightly-less-tiny one! I don't know what we would have done without it.
• The front door and the little vestibule where we left our coats and hats (and, for part of the year, a gnome). The white door led to our neighbor, Abraham,'s house. The nice neighbor who never complained about us. :)
• The way you had to push the door in a little bit so it could lock with the keypad. And the way none of us ever quite knew the code right (fine, it was just me that never quite remembered it, though I knew the four numbers that comprised it) but somehow we managed to hit upon the right combination when it counted.
• The way everyone had to run out to the van and help unload the groceries every week, while I turned on the hazard lights and blocked the street. When everyone came to help, we got pretty good at unloading fast, but it still stressed me out so much as I sat there worrying that cars would drive up behind me and get mad. No one ever really did, though.
• I liked this tall laundry drying rack in the upstairs bathroom/laundry, and the tall dormer window it fit inside. I liked doing laundry in this house. Everyone's bedroom was just right there along the hall and I could mostly hang shirts to dry right in people's closets or on their clothes racks, saving this bathroom rack for smaller things. I liked walking along the hall delivering clothes to the various rooms.
• The button on the washing machine had to be held down for 3 or 4 seconds in just the right way for the washer to start. Sometimes it would take me 10 tries to get it right, because it wasn't clear when you had gotten it right, so you'd press it again and it would turn off and get confused and start its little process all over again. Once I could have sworn the thing was broken for good and I was so fed up with it! But I finally just went out of the room and while I was gone, it penitently started up without me.
• The shower door closed with a swiveling latch and it was hard to get it the door pulled closed enough to position the latch. It didn't seem like the water leaked out onto the floor much, though (but the floor was noticeably bowed in another part of the bathroom, so…who knows).
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• Malachi's little collection of decorations on his shelves above his bed. The lavender fields picture isn't his (more's the pity) but was there already. But he's got DUNE. Several card decks. His little "worldhopper" wallet pouch. And some of his lapel/tie pins. I think it looks quite homey!
• The way the beautiful light streamed into the kitchen on summer afternoons…and the HEAT it brought with it! And the (slightly broken and unsteady) fan we had constantly running there, day and night. And the droopy-but-always-somehow-surviving plant on the dining room windowsill.
• The beautiful stone wall in the kitchen. Adorned by…this guy. (I did learn his name. Bonheur or something. He's a snowman. No! Bonhomme! It's Bonhomme. Like "bonhomie," you know.) Wearing his red tuque.
• The broken brick that always fell out of this fireplace (chimney? hearth? I don't know what to call it) whenever someone swept the floor too enthusiastically.
• It doesn't look it here, but in the evenings and nights this dining room was SO DIM. Unbearably dim. We could barely see our food! But sometime after Canadian Thanksgiving, we strung up some Christmas lights across the ceiling and it helped SO much. It was so much more pleasant to eat in there after that!
• I liked the sideboard in the dining room. The drawers weren't good and you had to really haul them out by their handles (with an unpleasant scraping sound), but I moved all the silverware and cups and plates into it, and it was nice to have everything right there by the table.
• The window from Junie's loft down into our bedroom, always with someone in it calling "Mommy!" There was often a little patch of light coming through this window very late at night, even after I went to bed, either because Junie was up way too late (tsk tsk), or because she'd fallen asleep with her lamp on!
• Speaking of light, the switches were weird. The switch for the downstairs open area between the kitchen and living room was upstairs to the left of the bathroom. That was okay, because it was kind of nice not to have to go down to turn it off. But the switch for the living room light was in the middle of the room, between the windows, and I never remembered to turn off that one before leaving the room! I always had to go back for it and then stumble out past the plant and grey chair in the dark.
• Also, I found it funny that there was almost nothing on the walls anywhere in the house, but there was a random drawing of a fern leaf placed carefully in the middle of this wall outside the living room. Who saw that wall and thought what it most needed was a drawing of a fern?
• Junie practicing her splits twice a day (using Goldie as her "block" here to stretch her further!)
• These guys drawing at the counter. And the markers, very uncharacteristically, in the mug which they were supposed to be kept in. (Usually we tried to keep that marker mug up on the mantel where people couldn't get it. But somehow everyone could get it anyway.) And look, there's a mug of one of Goldie's little bouquets she always contrived to find in the yard.
• This little kitchen white board/bulletin board bothered me, because it had ghost marker writing on it and I couldn't get it off. We would often pin up one of the kids' pictures on it, but you couldn't fit two papers across, so you'd have to put one up on the bulletin board and another awkwardly below it with a magnet. Tsk tsk.
• The fact that these doors closed. We never closed them, except when the kids were doing their play of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for us. And for one of the girls' Hallmark movie scenes. And when the Young Family stayed with us and used this room as a boys' dorm.
• The Quebec flag on the Assemblée Nationale, which we had a view of in that same direction from the top floor. I liked looking out from the bathroom and always seeing it flying there. Hmm, it's hard to make out in this picture, but it wasn't hard to see with our real eyes! Let's zoom in…
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There.
And here is the front of that beautiful building. Ziggy thought the sort of cage the flag flew from looked like a ship's "crow's nest," and I agree! (He said he always thought it was on top of a ship when he looked out and saw it!)
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• The Delta Building, which went from DELTA to ELTA to LTA while we were in Quebec (we fully expected to see "TA" soon but sadly, never got to)
• "Daisy's tree" (though I guess it could have been my tree or Clementine's tree or Malachi's tree just as well; we all had windows facing that way); the one she could see out her window, which had a few weeks of SUCH bright orange leaves but was so pretty through every season:
• The skylight above Sam's and my bed, which I loved hearing rain on, and seeing snow pile up over, and once the moon even positioned itself right above it to shine in on my face when I woke up in the night.
• The multi-paned, multi-layered, shuttered windows, which were so weird to figure out at first, but really worked so well. They let in just enough air on the hot days, and did a great job insulating in the winter when the outer window alone let in too much cold air.
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• The way the little boys put up their random drawings (and cuttings) all over the house with tape.
• Argh, that sink! Some part of the faucet, the aerator I think, wasn't installed. And though we found the part, it was broken and wouldn't go in. That meant the sink sprayed water EVERYWHERE! No matter how softly you tried to turn it on, it soaked everything within in a 2 foot radius. It was so annoying, and always left a huge puddle of standing water on the stripe of counter behind the sink. I had to soak it up with a dishcloth multiple times a day, and it was still always there.
•Above the sink, that funny little alcove. I kept the dishcloths up there because if I put them down lower, the little kids would get out a new one every time they wiped anything, and we would run out too quickly (I only had 6 of them. Dishcloths, not kids). Also in that spot was some kind of gold drink mixer, the kind the bartender in movies shakes things up in. (I liked to call it a "brandy snifter" in my head, though I have absolutely no idea what that is, because I like the way it sounds.) Goldie sometimes used it as a vase for her little bouquets, and I suppose it was the best use it was ever put to.
• The few times there was frost inside the windows! My friend Rachael, who lives in Edmonton, bless her (it is currently -26º there, just so you have some idea) says this happens at her house all the time. But I have never seen it before. And it definitely made the world feel VERY COLD. Looked kind of pretty, though!
• The special way the cupboards had to close, right side then left side.
• This bottom kitchen cupboard had a ton of random stuff in it (cords, light bulbs, gloves, tools, badminton rackets) and we were always trying to keep Ziggy from getting it all out and ruining it. With little success. Hopefully no one else really knew what was in that cupboard either, or cared about it!
• This bathroom cabinet (which also had a special way to close, with a spring that didn't work, so one door was always slowly swinging open) was where all the sheets were kept, and none of them matched and none of them were exactly the right size for the beds. With a bit of help from Daisy, I pulled everything out and re-folded all the badly-folded fitted and flat sheets, and put the different sizes on different shelves, and separated the duvet covers from the regular coverlets, etc. From then on it was my Great Life's Work to make everyone keep everything in its proper place. (My Great Life's Work was an abject failure.)
• The balcony doors had SUCH a special way to close that I usually just didn't close them. It involved turning the handle a certain way while the doors were in a certain spot to send a rod up and down into the doorframe. But it was very finicky and hard to do properly, and sometimes when the rain or wind was strong, the doors would blow open with a big whoosh and scare me out of my wits. I loved having them open rain or shine for the first few months, and was sad when the time came to close them up for the cold.
• Because there was almost always a window or these doors open, we could constantly hear the noise of people, cars, fire engines, and church bells from outside. I loved that. It seemed too quiet when the doors were closed, and even MORE too quiet when we got home to Utah. Yes, there was the occasional drunk guy yelling nonsense in French (or worse, swear words in English), or group of loud youths out causing trouble, but it added to the atmosphere and I miss those city noises.
• I liked the heaters along the baseboards in this house too. We only had them on for the last month or so, but I liked walking by and feeling the heat from them.
After the first month or so, when the kids played with their magnatiles in the living room and the downstairs neighbor's boyfriend would come up sometimes three times a day and knock on the back door and sadly and longsufferingly ask them to "please be a little quieter, we are studying"—we finally confined the magnatiles to upstairs only. They were supposed to stay in Zig and Teddy's room, but they never did. They were always in the hall providing a terrifying tripping hazard near the top of the stairs. Or, most commonly, they were brought to Sam's and my room. This was largely because of the furry rugs we had gotten for our room, which were perfect for the kids to pretend with. The rugs were either bodies of water, with ferry boats on them, or ice rinks, with Zambonis on them. It was cute. But also very noisy.
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7. And last of all. Willa Cather's description of the winter twilight in Quebec City, which makes me homesick to read:
Jacques and Cécile ran out into the cold again, from the houses along the tilted street the evening candelight was already shining softly. Up at the top of the hill, behind the Cathedral, that second afterglow, which often happens in Quebec, had come on more glorious than the first. All the western sky, which had been hard and clear when the sun sank, was now throbbing with fiery vapours, like rapids of clouds; and between, the sky shone with a blue to ravish the heart—that limpid, celestial, holy blue that is only seen when the light is golden.A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from neighbours' houses. If the Count should go back with the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city (yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break for just this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of being in one's own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the deep sea.As they sat there, the other children began to go home, and the air grew colder. Now they had the hill all to themselves—and this was the most beautiful part of the afternoon. They thought they would like to go down once more. With a quick push-off their sled shot down through constantly changing colour; deeper and deeper into violet, blue, purple, until at the bottom it was almost black. As they climbed up again, they watched the last flames of orange light burn off the high points of the rock. The slender spire of the Récollet chapel, up by the Château, held the gleam longest of all. Cécile saw that Jacques was cold. They were not far from Noël Pommier's door, so she said they would go in and get warm.
I have never loved winter, but as I look at these pictures and read these beautiful descriptions, I think I could have learned to love the Quebec winter. Someday, maybe we will go back and experience winter and spring!
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