#bird cloud

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything -- cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks -- press inexorably on and on.

Jack Kerouac nailed it when he wrote of "that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadians abroad in America."[1] There was one year in my life when I lived in Montréal, and several when I commuted there from Vermont to graduate school, picked up a little joual, became familiar with the flat riverine landscape and the shapes of faces. Years later came a weekend in my life when I went to a gathering of Franco American writers on an island in Maine. As I walked into the room I was slammed with the shock of recognition. Here were non-Anglo people, people with familiar lineaments, with long fingers and slender bones, with dark eyes and hair certain ways of moving and gesturing. Tears came to my eyes and for a little while I felt the curious but lovely sensation of being with the home herd and fantasized moving to Québec, Montréal or the Gaspé or Montmagny. But by then I had been too long in solitude, to anglicized for the joy to last. [1] Jack Kerouac, letter to Yvonne Le Maitre, a critic-journalist who wrote for Québec publications, September 8, 1950. I am indebted to David Plante for the quotation, and to Isaac Gewirtz of the New York Public Library, who tracked down the source.