| Excerpts from Gabrielle Roy�s Enchantment and Sorrow One lovely thing about our life was that Nature hardly ever failed to leave a benign mark on us throughout our trials and tribulations. Or perhaps it was because we kept looking to Nature for consolation that she always granted it. (13) Why is it that we who were often so unhappy could also be so happy? That�s what astonishes me most, even today. Just as I also find the coming of happiness more surprising than the coming of sorrow, not because it�s more unusual but perhaps because it�s less easily explained. Happiness came to us like the wind, from nothing and from everything. Summer was a festival in itself for us. When I was a child I didn�t know anyone who cherished summer as we did. Whatever worries or sorrows Maman had, as soon as summer came she�d drop everything to gather up the geraniums and fuchsias that had spent the winter on the windowsills and plant them in the earth around the house. We�d soon see the pale, sickly things return to health. Papa used to plant a big vacant lot not far from our house, having obtained permission form the municipal council to cultivate it until it was sold, which couldn�t have happened for a long time because I seem to remember our always having that big, beautiful vegetable garden. And summer repaid our efforts. Our fruit trees gave us sweet smelling flowers and then tart little apples from which Maman made an exquisite jelly, and also cherries and small blue plums. Our yard behind the house was surrounded by a wooden fence and was always full of robins and sparrows, which sang so loudly and cheerfully we couldn�t help hearing them, even when our troubles were many. It wasn�t a very big yard but it bordered a lane which in turn bordered an unsubdivided meadow, so that all the open space behind the house looked just like a glimpse of green prairie. My father would sit in the half-darkness by the open door of the little summer kitchen and contemplate it endlessly. And sometimes you could see a red glow in the sky between the two street corners beyond, mysteriously deepening the narrow cleft between the houses and making it seem to reach into a kind of limitless space, right in the middle of the city. If we ever went to talk to Papa at that hour as he sat at his observation post, there was a strange and surprising peacefulness in his voice. It was if we�d brought him back from some infinite distance, from his youthful excursions in the wilds, perhaps. (31-32) I loved the open prairie; I�ve always been fascinated by it. For all its reticence, it�s always had more to say to me than any other landscape. (32) Eventually I discovered another road that I could take to find that unaccountable excitement. A little section road bordering my uncle�s farm [in Somerset] climbed a slope to a high point from which the view across the prairie was even more breathtaking. I told no one of my discovery. I�d pretend I was going there to gather hazelnuts and wild cherries. The happiness awaiting me at the end of my walk was so mysterious I seemed to feel I�d risk losing it if I talked to anyone at all about it; perhaps even if I admitted it to myself. I�d set off along that rutted little road. Nothing was more ordinary. It consisted only of two cart tracks with weeds growing rife between them and the bushes on either side. There was no horizon, nothing but the sound of wind imprisoned in the dense shrubbery, intoning a kind of tedium. Then all at once the revelation, the magnitude, the endless unfolding of naked earth! That little road to nowhere took me to the edge of eternity. A wave of inexplicable joy would sweep over me. Where it came from, why it was granted me, what it was made of, I don�t know and I�ve never known. For a long time I believed the excitement I was promised, there at the end of the little dirt road when I was sixteen, was a joy of this world, to be seized while I was alive. Now I�m not so sure. Perhaps that joy awaits us elsewhere (37) |