If you were to take a drive down to 155 Chemin des Patriotes Sud in Mont Saint-Hilaire today, you would be met with an unremarkable modern, one storey building tasked with providing some service to the clientele of the neighbouring public manor. If you were inclined to stop there, step out and take a look around, I bet you wouldn’t be able to guess the history of the place that once stood there. The place that my grandparents, their kids, and their grandkids once called home.
A lot of this may not make any sense to you, I apologise in advance. A lot of my memories of the old house were formed during the time in my life when I was too young to understand the scope of the world around me; when my social circle was limited to the people I saw frequently enough to know anything about. At the time, that circle was just my family, and that family was my whole world.
Aside from being family, we were good friends, more than just the type of friends you’d make at that time in your life– you know, the friends by circumstance that you met because they were sitting in the seat next to you in class? I can’t remember how often we saw each other at that house, but when I was younger it felt like we were there every weekend. A home away from home.
As a kid it was hard to feel like the house wasn’t special, in the sense that it was so extraordinary that I couldn’t wrap my little head around the way it made me feel. Even now, at 21 years old, I have a hard time putting into words how enchanting it was, how much larger than life it could be. Even now, the only logical explanation was that it must have been magical.
If you were to take a drive down to 155 Chemin des Patriotes Sud in Mont Saint-Hilaire 10 years ago, you’d be met with a lush, green forest and a small opening between two hedges leading into a gravel path that made its way to the front yard of the house. That was the view I always saw as my family pulled up to turn in. I never got tired of it. Going down the path felt like travelling down the forest's throat with the house at its center, like a pearl in a clam's shell.
Half-way down, the trail widened up on one side where the house's firewood was kept in a neat stack. Did I mention this was an old house? Well, it was, but its age definitely contributed to its charm. Every year, right before the first snowfall, the entire family would get together to help bring wood down to the backyard so my grandparents could have easier access to it. My grandfather would bring out his tractor that had a trailer connected to it, and we’d load it with firewood over the course of an afternoon. I remember how strong I felt being able to lift more than two pieces at a time, the adults would stroke my ego by pointing out how big they thought I was going to become because of it. My secret was that I’d grab the driest pieces at the top; they were the lightest. I’m pretty sure everyone knew.
Once the trailer was full, the kids would hop in and we’d ride it all the way to the backyard, taking in the glamour before we had to unload it again when we stopped.
That was my second favourite tradition at the house, the loading and unloading of the firewood. We have a picture of everyone in the trailer together somewhere in my house.
Going back to the path, towards the end the forest opened up dramatically onto the property, as if it were showing off its favourite possession. All forests are magical in their own different way, and occasionally they’ll pull something from the outside world into their own to participate in their impenetrable festivities. The entire plot was the host, and we were the guests of honour.
Each one of my aunts and uncles had their own room and each of them felt like stepping into their minds and exploring their personalities strewn across the walls in paintings and wallpapers. One room was deep burgundy and had a princess canopy over the bed that looked like it jumped out of an old Disney film. Another was yellow with flowers, had a golden bed frame and a painting of an old dirt road hung up next to it. Another was so large that you could probably fit a small apartment inside of it, and had a waterbed that I thought would pop if I climbed onto it, flooding the entire house.
The most awesome of rooms, though, was the en suite bathroom that connected to the waterbed room. Its most apparent feature was the enormous fire-hydrant-red bath/shower that ran up the walls and into the ceiling. It was so big that it could fit me, my sister and, at the time, my 3 other cousins comfortably. Our infinite imaginations turned that big red bath into a big red starship and the knobs and faucets into cockpit controls.
I can still see it vividly almost ten years later, each little detail, and it was just a bathroom.
My grandmother was– and still is– a painter. Her and my grandfather had a taste in art that they displayed all throughout the house on whatever empty wall space could be found as windows into other worlds that we’d branch together in our heads to create increasingly arbitrary stories. The subject of a portrait painting in the dining room could become the protagonist in a journey that leads from a forest path painting in the bathroom and eventually ends in a painting of an old European barn in the hallway. Their art used to evoke so many different emotions in me, both good and bad. Like in the main staircase, there was an enormous tapestry of a horse or a goat in a forest with tall horns that transformed into trees as they stretched upwards, I remember finding the combination of colours and fictitious elements so eerie that I had a hard time staring at it for more than a few seconds at a time without feeling existential dread, like I was staring into the realisation of a nightmare that made me afraid of something that wasn’t inherently frightening.
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On the other hand, in the living room there was a painting of an old ship sailing through a storm and crashing waves that sent a misty haze across the main deck that always caught my attention in a more positive way. Whereas with the tapestry I had a hard time even glancing at it, I found it so easy to get lost in the adventure that that ship and its crew were having. Were they searching for treasure? A new land to build a home on? Or maybe just going on a voyage? I’d never know the answer, but much like the house itself, it was the way it teased my imagination that made it as memorable as it was.
That living room was my favourite room in the house. The ceiling stretched so high it felt like it was touching the sky. Sometimes I swore I even saw clouds clustering at its highest point. That living room was like its own entity; it felt too big, like the house was too small to have a room that expansive, as if it occupied its own little place in space and time.
Walking in, you’d be met with a fireplace whose chimney climbed all the way to the ceiling and displayed mounted hunting rifles that my grandfather used in his younger days, an organ– like the ones you see in churches– that dominated the room with its grandeur, whose golden pipes rose up in rows like an orchestra was playing at every press of a key and a staircase that led up to a loft overlooking the room that held a beautiful black grand piano. My grandfather used to play for us on that piano, and they still have it with them to this day, insisting that no home is complete without one.
During the more festive months of the year you could see the enormous Christmas tree that stood proud in the corner of the room, an ambassador of the forest surrounding the house that permeated its natural enchantments in a layer of pine needles at its base that had fallen off with time, whose only decorations were subtle white lights and star at its peak.
That was my favourite tradition of the year by far. Every year we’d gather up at my grandparent’s house on Christmas-Eve, where the entire family would prepare an enormous dinner that filled our bellies past the point of comfort, and then the younger members would get together in joyous anticipation at the front windows, desperately waiting for the sound of sleigh bells in the darkness of a snowy evening.
Every year a friend of my grandparents would put on a beard, glasses and a red Santa Claus outfit then come marching down the pathway in the forest carrying a sack full of gifts, bells that he would swing to announce his arrival, and a “nice” list with our names on them. As soon as he would walk through the front door, my sister, cousins and I would start jumping all over him like ravenous coyotes, each of us frantically shouting about whether or not we had been naughty or nice and what kind of gifts we wanted, while our parents desperately tried to hold us back, pleading for our patience. With effort, he would make his way to the living room where he’d sit down on the sofa and gently hand out gifts to every member of the family.
I wish I had the words that could explain to you just how spectacular those nights were, how special it made us feel; the fact that, in my mind, Santa Claus would have taken a pause in his night of travelling ‘round the globe to give us gifts. We, who were just a family in some house in the middle of some forest in a town no one’s heard of. What made us so special?
Up until now I’ve been attributing the majesty of this house to a sense of childlike fiction; an indescribable feeling I had when I was kid, and incapable of comprehending the inner machinations of what truly transpired inside of it. In my mind, it was a house inside a magical forest whose charm existed purely because its physical presence was greater than I was capable of understanding. So when the house was sold and demolished in 2016, it felt like all the wonder it had brought had been taken away with it.
It took a few years after it was sold for me to grasp what it meant, the magic I had felt wasn’t a product of the house’s condition, but rather one of the people I was able to share its condition with. Lifting logs into a trailer would not have been as memorable if my aunts and uncles weren’t cracking jokes at one another, the scale of the house wouldn’t have been as captivating if my cousins and I hadn’t found the appeal in exploring it, and Christmas would not have been as extravagant if my grandparents and their kids hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing to make it as special as it was.
It’s been more than 6 years now since the house was taken down, but the magic continues to live with us in spite of it. My grandparents have gotten older and wiser, their kids have started understanding that wisdom and their grandkids have all sprouted into young adults, each who share that experience and those memories I have the fortune to not call only mine.
If you were to take a drive down to 155 Chemin des Patriotes Sud in Mont Saint-Hilaire today, you would no longer be met with a bathroom with an enormous red bath or a living room that towered into the skies, a series of beautiful paintings competing for your attention or a labyrinth of bedrooms that tell stories in their features, but ask the trees about what they know, the plants about what they saw, the animals about what they heard or the stones about what they felt, and they would surely recall the stories that stood among them years ago.