Montreal Trip part VI: the Lac

If one is fortunate enough to have a lake in one's backyard, the least one can do is photograph it in every conceivable sort of light. I just couldn't help myself. I would be sitting and reading, or feeding Theo, inside, and suddenly the light would change and I would go charging off to look at it. As I sat on the dock watching the water move under the sky, listening to the birds and the wind, I felt like I might just dissolve and float away on that calm, inexorable current. I don't know when I've last felt so peaceful.

And that light!

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Montreal Trip Part V: Swimming

By far the thing we did most was play in the lake and in the backyard. The water was very mild so it felt good even when the day wasn't scorching hot. My swimming suit, of course, was in the lost suitcase (grr!) but I waded around and dangled my feet off the dock and enjoyed watching the boys swim and splash. As I think I already mentioned, the clouds over the lake seemed to move so fast. You could watch a little patch of dark clouds coming closer, and then it would drop a little rain, and then you'd see blue sky in the distance, and in a few minutes the clouds would be moving off the other way and the day would be sunny again.

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Montreal Trip Part IV: Oot and Aboot

On this trip we didn't spend a lot of time away from the house in Sainte-Julienne, but we did go to the grocery store and on a few other errands with Thierry. (This would be the environs on a map labeled "Montreal and environs.") My brother Karl served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in "Montreal and environs," in fact. And he had one mission companion who…well, I shouldn't tell his mission stories for him. But suffice it to say that the title of this post pays homage to that dear Elder.

At any rate, it was all gorgeous. I just love those forests crowding up to the edge of the vast green fields. Thierry told us that this is a big spot for maple syrup production—"Come back in March and you can visit the sugaring houses and eat the fresh maple candy made when they pour syrup on the snow," he said. What??! Sign me up. I read Miracles on Maple Hill when I was young and have dreamed of syrup-making ever since.

Huge skies. Huge clouds.

Thierry took us to buy beef for dinner, from his friend who raises Highland cows (that was the beef we ate, and boy was it tasty) and also these beautiful little deer—which both Thierry and his friend referred to as "Bambi"s. Haha. (We didn't eat any of them, but we could have.) They were so gentle and nice. The boys fed them grass and carrots. Even their antlers were covered with velvety fur.

I like this picture of Abe smiling at the deer and the deer smiling back.

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Montreal Trip Part III: In which I conduit my children with amour

Oh, ho! You thought I had posted all my pictures of Montreal, but you were just telling yourself what you wanted to hear. No, and this is not the final installment, either. While Sam was teaching everyday, the boys and I were left to amuse ourselves. We didn't have a car, so we set off to explore the neighborhood on foot. Of course it was breathtakingly beautiful. The houses were all nestled back away from the road among the trees, and you could see the lake peeking through every now and then. And even the roadside flowers were pretty and charming!

After a little ways the gravel road turned to paved road, but it was still quiet and secluded, with hardly any traffic.

One of the things that most surprised me about being in Quebec was how much of a foreign country it was! I had seen the bilingual signs in other parts of Canada, so I expected more of the same, but all the places we went in Quebec didn't bother with English at all, only French. And everyone we met was clearly a native French-speaker, with only bits of English to get along with! And everything just felt…foreign.

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Montreal Trip Part II: In which I realize a life-long dream

After we got picked up from the airport in Montreal, it was about an hour drive to the house we were staying at, in Sainte-Julienne. As we drove it got prettier and prettier (big green cornfields, rolling leafy hills, silos and dairy farms, maple forests) and we marveled at everything, as we desert-dwellers always do upon encountering the Edenic East Coast.

We didn't really know what to expect; when I heard "outside Montreal" I pictured something more…suburban, but this was way out among farms and small towns (I think Thierry said Sainte-Julienne only had a population of a few thousand, and it was quite spread out). And when someone had described the house as being "by a lake," I didn't realize there would be a lake in the backyard. We just couldn't believe how beautiful everything was.

When we got there the students all came out to say hi (the four of them were from Brazil and France and Norway and Maine, respectively. They all spoke good English and were really friendly). The students live downstairs and we were staying upstairs, with Thierry. After we got settled we went outside to explore. It was such a fairy-tale place for kids. For anyone, really! There was a treehouse and a little beach and two frog ponds and a firepit. And of course, beautiful Lac McGill!

I don't know if people who live with frogs all the time share our sentiment, but to us they are so novel and interesting. I know my aunt who lives in Seattle complains about how loud and insistently her frogs croak at night. We didn't hear much nocturnally from these frogs, but when we visited them as they sunned themselves on the rocks, they had the delightful habit of each making one offended "earrrrp" and leaping, one after another, back into the pond like this:

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Montreal Trip Part I: Airports and airplanes

I have many, many pictures to post of our trip to Montreal, and I thought I'd get the most boring ones out of the way first so we can all look forward to the exciting things to come! Boring if you think airports and airplanes are boring, that is. Which I don't. And my boys don't. Don't they ever!

But let me back up. When we were last in the Great White North, some of the workshop organizers were telling us about their "In-house Workshop," which is an intense 30-day class where four students go and live in a house outside of Montreal, and learn about art. (Or get "trained in the inspiring and stimulating environment of the Imaginism house," if you prefer.) We met Thierry, who lives in the house and teaches the workshop. And a few weeks later, he invited Sam to come up and be the Visiting Artist for a week sometime. And…he said Sam could bring the family! Sam didn't have classes to teach for Summer term, so he had a free July. It sounded fun, and mostly, we kept thinking about how much the boys would love riding an airplane. (They LOVE airplanes!) Even if the rest of it wasn't fun, it almost seemed like the plane rides would be worth it! :) There are too many of us to make flying feasible, normally, so we thought it might be a chance they wouldn't soon have again. It seemed a bit much to try and bring ALL of the kids, though, and my mom volunteered to watch the three girls so we could just take the boys.

So. There we were, at the Salt Lake Airport. Hooray!

It all started out nicely enough. We had our little dinner of muffins and gyoza we'd brought from home (yum) and the boys were in heaven watching the planes come and go. We occasionally drive up to the airport to watch planes, but you can't get a very good view from the road! So this was special.

Then our flight started getting delayed, and it got later and later. The sun went down. The boys explored the entire airport and rode up and down the escalators, and the moving sidewalk, which is for your traveling convenience. Please stand to the right so that others may walk past you on the left. Thank you for your courtesy.

Teddy did this to pass the time.

We finally got on the plane at 11:30 p.m. We had to fly west to L.A. first, which seems like a terrible waste, but what do I know?

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