Coming Home

It's is a place I have not visited in 15 years, but it is a place that I call my homeland. For the first time, my family piled into a rented minivan and drove to Bolton Centre, Quebec, an hour south of Montreal. It is the area where part of my family settled as brickmakers in the early 1800's, and where my great grandmother, grandparents lived until they died. It's a part of the country with low, elbow-shaped moutins and hills that pour out small creeks that my father used to fish for brook trout in as a child. Narrow gravel roads wind between the valleys and rivers - along routes once used by stage coaches that traveled between Boston and Lower Canada. We pass weathered cottages, ramshackle homes with stove pipes leaking out white woodsmoke that scents the damp fall air. Another small farm, hacked years ago from the thick maple forests, is littered with beaten down trucks and cows slop through the muddy paddocks. We stopped at the old Monastry, which overlooks a valley and Mount Saint Gregoire, where they make cheese and bread. I remember driving through these roads during our summer vacations, in the back seat of that old Pontiac station wagon, feeling as we passed these rivers and forests, that we were all alone in the world. Just us. And that feeling returned, again with my father at the wheel, the bluegrass music playing, that we had come home.