06 Sep LA MÈRE, LA TERRE

La France calls me back. My first visit to the country was for a family reunion when I was 21. The following year, after I graduated from college, I lived with my uncle and his family in Paris for six months while I undertook an apprenticeship in alchemy. I have returned more than half a dozen times since. When I come back I am enveloped by familiar quarters, entrancing melodies, and alluring fragrances. This is the Motherland, the land of some of my maternal ancestors, ma Mère, la Terre. The name of my most ancient (known) French grandmother is Ursule Lagrave, an unimportant country peasant who lived, died and was mostly forgotten in the nineteenth century. Her family name means gravel, or grave. Her body is now mostly dirt; she rests somewhere subterranean in Southwestern France.

We’ve come to France to visit my uncle and aunt, Gabriel and Siona who recently retired here. And we’ve come to consider moving here, to explore ancestral places near the Pyrenees Mountains, to ask the dead for their guidance, and blessings.

From my uncles’s home in Carcassonne we drove west toward the Atlantic and stayed a few days around Pau, where weather from the ocean comes inland and gets stuck on high mountain peaks. It rained constantly. Vines, trees, abundant flowers and lush greenery didn’t seem to mind.

One day, directly behind our rented hilltop house, on a narrow winding road, we came across a small street with my mother’s mother’s father’s family name. The next day we followed Chemin Ticoulat on foot and found a winery where we tasted sweet and dry white wines of Jurançon and had a simple picnic in a vineyard.

At the end of our stay in Pau we met up with my aunt and uncle and our French cousin, Edouard, a descendant of my great-grandmother’s brother who remained in France after she and her husband (my great-great-grandparents) emigrated to the US because of crop failure. Eduard invited us on a tour to the former home of his grandfather and the ancestral surrounds.

I am particularly curious about these places because I recently received and restored reels of travel films that were my great-grandfather’s, with footage of his visit to France in 1949 and a precious section of the reunion with his uncle in Ogeu-les-Bains.

We met in Gan for lunch and drove south in a convoy through driving rain into the cloud shrouded mountain contours of Pyrénées Atlantiques. When we got to the Laclergue family house, the rain slowed for five minutes. We got out of our cars for photos and imagined the film of my great-grandparents dressed in haute couture finery of the times meeting their French paysan kin in the muddy pasture behind the house.

From there we drove to the village of Lasseube and went inside the church where my ancestors must have attended countless masses, weddings, baptisms, and funerals. The endarkened space gave us shelter from the rain. We flicked on the lights, surveyed the saints and lit candles in front of the Holy Mother. I turned to Edouard and asked for the name of the church. Saint Catherine, he said…my name. I felt the ancestors press in. “You’ve come home, at last” I heard them murmur. My soul never left.

Catherine Brooks, 2023

Film still, my great-grandfather and his uncle, circa 1949