It’s the 44th annual French Festival in Cape
Vincent, the little village along the St. Lawrence in upstate New York where we
have owned a summer house for 30 years.
French Festival commemorates the French people (especially
the nobles) who came here at the start of the French Revolution in 1789. Land
companies with vast holdings in upper New York State (notably James Donatien
LeRay de Chaumont, after whose son Cape Vincent is named) were actively
soliciting settlers from France.
The wealthier French people aimed to recreate grand estates
here in the wilderness, with manor houses and servants, gardens and fountains,
liveried footman for their carriages and afternoon musicales. In Cape Vincent, they built a house for Napoleon, who unfortunately never made it here. But by the early
1830s, when the then-cutting–edge Erie Canal had shifted the commercial boon
90 miles south of here, most of those
wealthier French people moved back home to la belle terre that wasn't so freakin' cold. (There would be other boonlets, when
wealthy New Yorkers and Southerners took the train up to summer in the Thousand
Islands….there were hotels on virtually every corner of our little village…but
those boonlets passed too.)
Nearly two centuries later, the vendors set up along the
village streets and on the green are hawking handcrafted art and signs (“Up
here we don’t skinny dip …we chunky dunk”), handmade jewelry and sweaters ,
handcrafted spices and dips, local artisanal wines.
I buy some things for my sons’ birthday. (Matt, now 30, was
born July 13. Mike, now 26, was born July 14.)
I remember French Festivals of the past. One year, I recall browsing vendors’ stalls
with one – and maybe two --strollers. Matt was in one stroller, his cousin
Louis Benedetto was in another. We dragged Lou’s brother Michael , then maybe 4
or 5, by the hand. Lou’s and Mike’s mom,
my sister Marian –who lived in Tucson – was spending part of the summer with
me. We were young mothers then, not women of a certain age.
I remember my father happily running to the firehouse where
they sold French pastries on FrenchFest day, so he could score his Napoleons
and French horns before they ran out. After my parents retired, they left New
Jersey and moved a block away from our summer house to a year-round home. After
my dad died in 1998, my mother slowly evaporated in that house until we figured
out what to do with her in her dementia.
Cape Vincent is such a small town people know who you are
even if you don’t know them. One day two
years back I forgot to retrieve my ATM card when I was getting cash from the
machine outside the one bank on the one commercial street in town ( a street
with many empty lots where stores and hotels have been demolished, for
instance, the Red-amd-White Grocery, run by the Wiley brothers and burned to
the ground in the Eighties.) Hours after getting my cash and still unaware I
had misplaced my card, I was riding my bike past the bank when a bank officer
stepped out and called to me: “Hey, you forgot your ATM card.”
And they know you even when you are forgetting yourself. I
remember Cape Vincent neighbors disapprovingly telling me how my mother would
stand at the intersection by the one village grocery store still in town,
looking east and west, north and south, trying to remember where she lived. She
lived two blocks from the store.
I remember one French Festival Day, when I drove my sister
Nora’s kids Nick and Kendall from Cape Vincent to their home near Sand Bay 7
miles away. All the kids in the car – Nick and Kendall and my children Tom and
Maeve, then maybe ages 6 and 5 –were smirking and snickering. I didn’t know
why. Turns out Nick had gotten a kitten from some other kid at the Fest, and
was transporting it in his backpack. Turned out the kitten had fleas. My sister
Nora was not happy.
Of course, FrenchFest is not the same without my sister Nora,
who was our guide to the people, stories, tragedies, scandals and bargains of
the North Country. She didn’t come to French Festival last year – by that time,
she wasn’t waking up until 2 or 3 pm – but she always came in years past. Nora
died October 29th of ovarian cancer.
This year, it is just my husband Jim and I at French
Festival. Matt and his wife Melany were up here for the Fourth of July. Mike is
studying for bar exams in New York and New Jersey. Tom and Maeve, now 18 amd
17, are home in New Jersey and were supposed to drive up here together. But Tom
says he can’t stand being in a car with Maeve and her negativity for 5 hours. And Jim won’t allow Maeve to drive up by herself.
She got her driver’s license only 2 months ago.
I miss having my children here for French Festival, and the
ways they are drawn to the eccentricities for sale that resonate with their own
eccentricities. I call Maeve to remind her she would be missing the fresh-squeezed
lemonade.
My oldest, Matt, on the phone with me the other day, said, “You
and Dad are getting a taste of the post-apocalyptic world.”
Matt’s speech is sometimes a little overwrought, but I
understood what he was saying: That Dad and I are getting a taste of what it
will be like to be empty-nesters. We’ve had so many people around us for so
long that just the two of us seems a little….empty. So many of the voices that
ricocheted off the walls of our summer house are gone – grown up and moved
away, or silenced like those long-ago musicales in the wilderness.
Maeve called me last night to tell me she had run into our
neighbor, Mrs. Corrado at TJ Maxx in New Jersey. Mrs. Corrado, a chatty, beautiful
woman in her forties, said, “Maeve, I can’t believe how grown you are. And I can’t
believe I have two children in high school. I’m almost an empty-nester myself.”
And, according to Maeve,
Mrs. Corrado dissolved in tears.
“She’s a good-hearted, emotional woman, Maeve,” I said.
Some of us get settler’s ennui and go back to France. Some of
us evaporate into dementia. Some of us remember flea-bitten kittens and
strollers long trashed, even as we laugh at the pre-school sisters boogeying ferociously in
their double stroller at the FrenchFest parade to a marching band rendition of “When
the Saints Go Marching in.”
We all ride or repress our emotions --or some mix-and-match thereof -- as we spiral through the years.
