Lost and

I found my voice this morning with Peanut.  I started singing an aria to him as I was changing him, and he, gazing up at me (in intense admiration) started singing too.  It was a duet culminating with a sloppy kiss from him at the end, as all duets should be.  The song was from Samson and Delila by Saint-Saens (whose name I tend to mispronounce - "san-son?" "son-san?" - a similar butchering to "en haut," a word which, before one learns to switch positions in the nasal passages like changing train tracks, is reduced to nothing more than a guttural stutter.)  Eloquent.  But the song burst out of me like the sun and brought back a memory of my mother sitting with Turandot playing loudly on the stereo, the opera score in her lap, and tears in her eyes as she sang along.  I was glad to have found my voice, and by association, this memory.

Mr. Welcome went with his brothers and father to clean out the family's country home that was recently sold.  It's part of a hamlet and is two-thirds of the long farm house, called a longière.  His grandfather bought it when his mother was young so that they would have somewhere to go for vacation; he ended up taking residence in his later years.


This home was a treasure trove of memories and would-be antiques (Mr. Welcome's aunt laughs at my notion of antiques, considering the term to apply only to anything dated B.C.) had there not been a fire that destroyed so much of it.  Nevertheless, Mr. Welcome came home with an old armoire and other small furniture, and lots of books.  There was a Bible that dates to 1772 and I only know that because I looked up the Roman numerals and had them converted to something I could read.  I was so excited to have something that was printed only 100 years after the printing press was invented - that is, until I looked that up too and discovered I was off by a couple hundred years, bringing perhaps justified shame on America's World History education - at the very least, on me.  But a friend commented that the Bible was four years older than our country, so that's something.  


We found some old paintings of his grandfather's, and the plan for a wall he decorated in the Louvre (we have to see if it's still there).  And then we found this.  Mr. Welcome's great-grandmother's notebook from 1903, detailing what she was learning in high school.  Honestly, the book was so perfectly written in calligraphy, it could have been printed (the printing press had been invented by then).  There were no errors and no wasted pages.

There was a well on the side of the house that dates to the 14th century, I think.  The house was probably newer, but you still had to duck when going from one room to another because the people were that much shorter when it was built.  Mr. Welcome is moved to save these precious articles (so many of them were on their way to the bin) in tribute to his family's history, and I am moved to preserve them by the very fact that they're so old, myself hailing from a country that is so new.  All in all, there were some great finds.

On Sunday at church, I sat behind three people who looked new.  I asked them if they had a song book, and the teenager responded that he didn't speak French.  I discovered that they were from NY so I offered to translate for them.  When the service was over, I learned that the woman was Columbian, but grew up in America, and she had flown to Paris with her teenage son because she was reuniting with her long-lost brother who lives in France.


They had been separated at birth, and though she had tried for so many years to find him, she didn't have his official birth name.  It was when she was going through some medical papers that she found a document with his name.  And from there, you'll never guess how she went on to find him.  Facebook!  As soon as she clicked on his profile, she found herself staring at a younger version of her father and knew right away it was him.  So she and her son flew all this way, spent a fortnight in the City of Lights, and communicated in Spanish through many late nights to catch up on everything that had happened to them in their lifetime apart.  Their joy and emotion radiated through their entire conversation.


Of all the great finds, some are so treasured they cannot be valued.


* I couldn't post a comment on my own blog to tell you how grateful I was for your encouragement after my last post, so I'm posting it here.  Thank you.