OUR FATHER

OUR FATHER

The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.

Feet wide apart, hands on hips, chin held high

Speak strength, confidence.

One man aboard a lake faring vessel, he has weathered a storm.

Ice clings to the bare frozen metal in sheets and  sharp sickles.

The water is calm now.

This man will become our father.

Aboard the vessel of our childhood, he is captain.

The Girls go to Catholic School/ The Ten Commandments

        I can hardly believe now that age eight was determined by the Catholic Church to be the "age of reason;"  meaning that an individual should be able to tell right from wrong.  It was all very confusing to the girls despite Sister Lorenzo's attempts at elucidation.  The Ten  Commandments did offer some important and clear guidelines.  Thou shalt not kill or steal were understandable.  Honor thy father and mother, well, the nuns interpreted this into obey your mother and father.  Taking the Lords name in vain really worried the girls, however.  Not because of any propensity on their part but father seemed to employ the Lords name and usually it was not in a beseeching prayerful voice.  Coveting some one's wife, this one did not concern them except when having to recite all ten for Sister.   Coveting things though was a problem on occasion having the girl's best friend next door.  She had her own room fashionably appointed and bed always neatly made,  Welch's grape juice in little bottles in the ice box and Hostess Twinkies for lunch.  She did not have to share her bike with anyone, either.   There was one girl in her house and three in ours.  She probably coveted having a sister while the girls dreamed of  being an only child.  Telling a lie was bearing false witness.  Keep holy the Sabbath was kept religiously.  For as long as the girls could remember,  Father took the family to the earliest Mass possible, 6:30am every Sunday.  On occasion ,even this was too late and the family traveled to Holy Cross Church in Marine City to go to the 6:00 am Mass.  Each of the girls wanted to be the one next to father to hear his clear tenor voice sing the Latin words they could not understand.  The reward of early mass  were tender and still warm cinnamon pecan rolls from Dewey's bakery on Broad Bridge road.  Dewey's was open on Sunday because they were Seven Day Adventists who kept the Sabbath or Saturday.
                        THOU  SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY  

               When this commandment first fell upon the innocent ears of the girls they could not imagine that it had anything at all to do with them, not being adults.  And what could it possibly mean, surely it was not a sin to merely be an adult.    Sister explained that adultery was entertaining impure thoughts,  viewing impure pictures and participating in impure actions with your own body or someone else's  body.   It became  clear without saying that the impure part of our body was covered by our underwear and referred to by our parents as "private parts."   Private parts were never discussed and kept covered in public.  The girls never imagined that there were sins involving these parts.  

The Magic Forest: Years Later

The Magic Forest                

       As new houses crept down Clinton Avenue toward the city limits,  progress missed a beat just down from the girls house.  A modest patch of mid-western deciduous forest stood undeveloped.  The stand of trees was parted only by a grassy two track lane disappearing into the darkness.  The land belonged to the man the girls would know as "Old Man Langell."  Old Man was spoken as if it were his first name, never Mr. Langel.  His occupation, hermit.  
      Two theories arose as to the motivation for his hermitage.  He had been a WWI veteran and suffered from shell shock.  Post traumatic stress disorder is what it is called today.  He took the money he was given for his service, bought the woods and retired from the world.  The other theory is that a house fire in town killed both his wife and child.  In his sorrow and grief, he took his insurance money, bought the woods and retired from the world.  I still don't know if either of these stories is true.   The stories did produce in the girls a sense of tragic sympathy for the old, lonely man cycling through the seasons of their youth.
     What the girls did know was that the man did not welcome company or conversation.  Stories swirled around about shot guns loaded with rock salt and readily discharged if anyone cared to challenge this theory and pay him a visit.  The girls observed this old man from a safe distance as he rode by their home on his bicycle occasionally with his shot gun across the handle bars.  On trash day he could be observed more closely as he stopped to examine the throw-aways that could become useful items.  The neighbor claimed that she had been startled to find him peering into her window.  He struck fear, wonder, mystery and imagination into the childish minds of the girls, which of course they found thrilling.


Jackson Woods 
     
     At the edge of the neighbor boy's  house the girls discovered a beaten path leading into the woods.  A path invites a child like a magnet.  No question arose in their minds as their legs carried them into the damp and sun dappled shadows.  The ferns brushed their legs as a small shallow pond came into view.  The unfamiliar sound of croaking frogs stopped them in their tracks.  The girls imaged monsters of all sorts.  Frozen in a state of indecision as to whether to continue or flee, the voices of other children rose above the din of croaking.  Proceeding cautiously toward the voices, with hearts beating like birds against their rib cages, a group of older boys came into view.  A few moments passed before the boys awareness included the presence of the girls.   "GIRLS!!!!,"  they shouted in unison with undisguised revulsion.   Advancing angrily with hands full of acorns, they began pelting the intruders.  Now, truly frightened, the girls  skinny legs carried them out into the day light.  Eventually, the woods would draw them back into the magic dappled light, but not for a while.
     The boys were about five years older than the girls and soon enough their interest changed to girls and cars.  They abandoned the woods leaving it to the girls.  The boys had built a dock into the pond, a raft and a tree house high above the ground in a white pine tree.  These abandoned architectural features became home to the girls imagination. 
     This magical kingdom's boundaries were to the west, an ancient rusting and in places, falling down, barbed wire fence.  On the other side lie the forbidden and foreboding property of Old Man Langell.   To the East was another, better maintained fence which separated the cows and pasture from the hard wood forest.   Within these boundaries, the seasons of childhood cycled with nature from the first spring wild flowers to the clear frozen ponds of winter.  We simply called it "Our Woods."
       

YEARS LATER

      

When we were about 13 years old, a group of neighborhood girls challenged each other to follow a path into the woods that led to Old Man Langell's  cabin.  Yes, we knew all the scary stories about a shot gun loaded with rock salt, a noose hanging on a tree and more.  We had been frightened by him for so many years but yet he seemed harmless on his bike and scavenging on trash day.   Could he be just odd, lonely and old?  On a warm summer day, before school started 4 girls started down that path on a thrilling adventure.  Hearts pounding , flushed with excitement, holding hands but determined, we stepped into the shady  woods.  Progressing in silence, hardly breathing,  we inched forward soon engulfed by trees.  Someone stepped on a stick, it snapped, we screamed, startled and stopped in our tracks.  But we had made a pledge, we would continue down the path until we could see his one room cabin.  We didn't think of it then but nature was having its way with our teenage brains.  The thrill overtakes caution, new adventure, testing the limits and challenging our assumptions were all in the cards that day.  We didn't know the term "dopamine rush" yet but our brains did not need the words.  So, we inched down the path not knowing what would be around the next corner.  And then we saw the small simple cabin, tin roof rusting, outer walls grey aging planks, one step.  We froze and scanned the scene.  We were shocked when we made out a man standing by a lean to in old blue coveralls.  He glanced toward the group of girls, some screamed, turned and ran.  I kept walking toward him, my eyes locked with his.  He seemed amused, kind and not at all scary so I continued my approach.  Once beside him, we exchanged some words.  I glanced toward his out building/lean to and saw a few tools.  He walked toward the space I had noticed and showed me what he was working on.  Wooden  spatula shaped cooking tool.  I held it, ran my hands over the smooth edges and marveled at the grain of the wood. "Ironwood" and then "take it with you."  Looking back into his eyes, I saw a different soul than the one I thought I knew.  This man seemed at peace in his woods.  Later, when I would read Thoreau's Walden Pond or Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold, I would think of Old Man Langel living in the undisturbed hardwood forest, bathing in the river, living off the land like a hermit monk.  I'm not sure what happened to the spatula.  Perhaps, I just imagined him giving it to me.  He did give me a gift though.  The gift of not judging people on hearsay and that still waters run deep. 

    

Years later, on a weekend visit home, I heard that he had died, alone in his cabin.  The property was still intact, so I made a second visit to his cabin.  No thrills this time, just memories and a sadness seemed to cling to the trees.  When I got to his cabin, the door was open, one room, a simple wood burning stove, a bench/bed, a window for light empty except for an old Montgomery Wards catalog from the twenties or thirties.  I took it with me and still have to this day.  There are some pages dog eared and the mice probably chewed the back cover a little.  The dog eared pages are the ones of women's undergarments.  That discovery just made him seem more human and perhaps lonely.  Everyone should have a hermit to wonder about, get to know and in the process discover something about themselves.  

                         

FILLES DU ROI- Daughters of the King(Louis XIV)

   The girl's family name is French.  Grandpa came from Canada and his family roots were in Quebec, French Canada.  It would be years before  discovering that the Adam and Eve of the family lineage in the New World was a man named Claude Delaunay and a woman named Denyse Leclerc.

Claude Delaunay:  Only a few facts are know about this man.  He was born on May 30th 1627 in Amiens, France.  Living near the port city of Abbeville he must have learned his trade listed in the 1666 New France census as rope-maker.  He probably left France around 1664.  France was devastated by the 100 Year War with England, Spain was invading it's territories, and was still reeling from the effects of the plague (1635-37).  France was in ruin.   It was in these desperate times that Claude bid farewell to his family,  a family he would never see again.  It is almost certain that he boarded one of two vessels containing a total of 100 men  for a journey across the sea on the sailing ship "St. Jeane-Baptiste."  The journey took two months at sea.  It is recorded that Claude was granted land on Ilse de Orleans.  This is a large island in the St. Lawrence River just east of Quebec City.    Claude's land was on the south side, approximately 385 feet wide and  2 miles deep.  The land was granted in long strips extending from the water's edge.  From this land Claude cleared and built a rustic cabin.  It was to this cabin, he brought his bride, Denyse Leclerc on October 3 1669.

Crossing the Bridge to Isle de Orleans

http://www.ameriquefrancaise.org/en/article-312/%C3%8Ele_d'Orl%C3%A9ans,_a_Treasured_Natural_Heritage.html  See this link for more information.

       I wasn't aware of this connection.  In 2008 Mother and I toured the island as part of a Fall
Color Cruise.  I wish I had known at the time.  One of the Denomme genealogists had pinpointed the location of the land once claimed by our ancestor Claude Delaunay.   When Claude laid claim to the land it was a wooded wilderness.  By hand, he cleared and built the first log structure.  The first church, also a wooden structure was called St. Famille.  It was in this church that Denyse and Claude were married.

Denyse Leclerc

Born and baptized in Paris she was left as a child at a hospital in the care of the Sisters of Charity.  Her mother was believed to be a widow who could no longer provide for her.  It must be understood that the the hospitals of the mid 1600's were places of misery and suffering.  The Sister's of Charity were the first religious order to leave the confines of the Convent to dedicate their lives to caring for the poor and sick.  Hospitals were places that the poor came to die.  In the dark days of her orphan hood she worked side by side with the nuns in dank and dreary surroundings with the smell and sounds of death her constant companion. 
       King Louis XIV took an interest in New France as more than just an outpost and sought making the French territory a colony like the English had done.  There were many missionaries, explorers, trappers and soldiers in the region known as New France.  There were very few women.  To establish a more stable society based on community and family about 700 women voyaged across the Atlantic for an unknowable future as a pioneer.  Most of these women were orphans educated in convents.  Only girls of good character were chosen.  Did this poor child have a choice?  These were desperate times and so Denyce left everything she had known, loneliness, depravity and servitude with a dowry of 50 livre for a life she could not begin to imagine.  She was 17 when her vessel docked in Quebec City.  These women, the 700, were known as the "fille de roi" (girls of the king) or "Daughters of the King."  Most of the French descendants in the Americas are somehow related to these brave and tenacious women. 
    Denyse was boarded at a convent run by the Ursuline Sisters in Quebec city.  Large numbers of men would greet the vessels as they docked and view the shy girls as they were whisked to the convent.  The men paid their respects at the convent and usually within a week or two had a marriage proposal for which  the girls were under no obligation to accept.  Once the proposal was accepted, a marriage contract was drawn up and signed by the parties and witnesses.  Within 30 days a Church sanctioned wedding took place.  On occasion some of the marriage contracts were annulled if either party had second thoughts but almost always before the Marriage Sacrament.  Claude and Denyse had three children before his death in his 50's
      Although it is certain that our family progenitors arose from the common class of 17th Century France, with courage and hard work they laid a foundation of prosperity in the New World far surpassing any possibilities open to them in France.
      Ancestors, the traces of which live on today in our DNA hearken back to a spirit of survival and strength in the face of adversity.  There is a line in the movie Amistad spoken at the trial.  One of the men, stolen into slavery and now on trial for mutiny said, "I will call into the past and beg my ancestors to come and help me for at this moment I am the whole reason for which they existed."