WHAT TO DO WITH MY DNA

The entire batch of uncle Victor's children now operates an engineering company that designs and build sewer and water treatment plants for several small towns across New Brunswick. However, first thing Monday morning, my grandma Clementine would start to whistle again. She would make a stew with the leftovers, often ordering me to 'le caveau' to get a cabbage or a turnip. A trap in the floor concealed by a small carpet was the access to that crawl space with bins on each side. I never heard her complain, but this was the only job she did not care to do, climbing down to that dark and dank earth floor where she also stored potatoes all year. I was mighty proud to be of help to her as I adored my grandma and could not do a lot of really useful work around the house. Just now I was thinking of one song I learned from her. My grand-nephews and grand-nieces have a pretty mighty ancestor. And I wrote this story mostly for them, Strider, Stella, Thomas, Alexander, a...

On Sundays, she just smiled a lot and gave hugs to grandkids who had dinner in the kitchen with the goldfish, the dog and the cat. The many babies would be smothered away on the living-room sofas. Recently it was a lot of fun for me to discover several of my 80+ cousins on Facebook. One of them, Jean-Pierre, had taken me trout fishing at the time while his sister Corinne pointed out where raspberries and wild strawberries could be found. J-P is retired as a plumber, happy to hoist lobster traps on a winch-equipped trawler.

One weekday, one of the aunts wearing a strong perfume drove over and asked me the date of my birthday. I told her "Next Sunday". On that Sunday I received a mountain of gifts that included a bright red bicycle to use while I was there. My birthday was to be the next January with my family hundreds of miles to the west of where I was. Not a chance for greedy me to get a gift bonanza like what came on that Sunday. A week later I was stalled at the bottom of a hill I could not climb with that bicycle. Worse I was too tired to pedal 16 miles back to grandma's house. Uncle Victor picked me up at sunset on his way to the police station to report a missing kid. And then they found out about the birthday scam. I had a bad week and the laughter grew louder. My grandma never whistled with big people around her.

That large white clapboard house on the hill had all kinds of secrets for me to explore, with distinctive smells in different parts according to content, cedar from grandma's bedroom wedding chest, apple and berries in the corner where preserves were made, lavender in bathrooms, powerful sea odors in the sunroom if cod was drying, not to forget that powerful creamy smell in the milk and butter room near the kitchen. The woodshed was a clear winner in long-lasting olfactive memories, but the barn and chicken coop not far behind. And then the house smelled wonderful on Sundays when her long table was set and big chunks of salmon, gleaming in assorted white bowls set next to other bowls containing steaming string beans and potatoes from her garden, flowers that she arranged while I spread a lot of fresh parsley and dill in little bunches in saucers. Before the guests even arrived, I always had a taste of that bread still hot with farm fresh butter on it. My mouth still w...

This meant that on Thursday we made soap by boiling lard with some lie, lavender branches, then adding ashes from her stove into a pail by the door. We milked the four cows all week and separated enough cream, and then filling a large vat to make butter. She would start cranking the heavily geared separator for me because it was not strong enough to do that. Yet I took pride that I could keep it turning with no problem once it was started. Then we would go pick up some string beans with a large woven hamper. She would attack each long row by ambling sideways and bent over, filling her apron as she went, often whistling old Acadian songs and the Rudy Vallee hits that she loved. Only at the end of a long row would she stand erect after dumping the content of her apron into the hamper. Thirty minutes later we had a mountain of beans to cut, with a proud handful coming from me. I did learn to whistle a few songs, but the thought of the garden still fills me with a little gui...

I entered the farmhouse late afternoon tired and hungry, something grandma Clementine took care of for dessert with a fresh batch of “sucre à la crème”, something I would tentatively translate to "creamy sugar treats". My bedroom was on top of the kitchen, a see-through floor register allowing hot air and hot gossip to rise to my attention. I fell asleep hearing a lot of laughter downstairs, not realizing that I was probably the butt of some jokes, a skinny city nerd imported to use big farm machines and care for farm animals, helping out a supremely self-sufficient woman, their own mother. I woke up early with a ray of light and soft whistling coming from downstairs, seemingly blowing through the register the aroma of toasts and bacon. I soon found out that country bread was toasted right on top of the stove, and, more importantly, that my grandma was the best whistler ever. She spoke little, smiled a lot and whistled when she worked, which was pretty much all ...

Wait, those had not been created yet, but you get the picture. I was totally in awe of the hissing black locomotive, a smoke-belching New York Central steam locomotive for a two-hour ride to Montreal Central Station. There I was swiftly transferred to the new diesel Trans-Continental CNR train to distant New Brunswick. And so after long hours of drinking the scenery, my face glued to the train window, that night I slept well, a nice black man with a white cap had deployed the upper berth and put me to bed, adjusting the ladder for pipi purposes. Maybe the world was safer in those years

In the morning, uncle Victor came to the station with the farm pickup truck. On the way back he stopped for several hours at his brother’s plumbing business where he was a busy apprentice, not really wanting to run the farm after grandpa Joseph Napoleon had died. No one of the 16 kids wanted to be farmers except older uncle Ephrem who already had his own farm. All the others moved to cities and learned other trades, plumbing high on their list, with retail machinery not far behind. Uncle Ludger became a lawyer and later mayor of Dalhousie, yet most of my uncles had to deal with sewerage or greasy machinery. Two of my aunts became nurses, moved and married in Quebec City, Marthe a doctor and Yolande, a traveling salesman. Meanwhile, my mother turned out as a steno-typist for Montreal lawyers, married Albert and had Yvette and me during the war in distant Winnipeg. Dad was a chemical engineer in ammo factories all over Canada. The last one was in a Quebec village suitably ...

THE MAGIC MONTH WITH GRANDMA July 1952, I’m 8 ½ years old and about to ride solo an overnight train to Campbelltown NB from Valleyfield QC. My mother pinned a card on my clothes and gave instructions to the porter. I was so excited that I had not slept for 2-3 days, the prospect of spending a month with my grandma on the farm found better than all the Disneylands in the world. Wait, those had not been created yet, but you get the picture.