Green Day (April 2015)

Join us.

http://www.keeprocklandbeautiful.org/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/40602834114953843/

Strip Mall Cemetery

A liquor store parking lot, and a journey back through time.

I've noticed this lot ever since I moved back up to Rockland County, after many years away. Last winter, I began walking to town, first from my mother's place, then closer to town on my own. It's a little cemetery squeezed in between two shopping lots, a place of history that pops out in contrast to the bland surroundings. But the headstones weren't the only thing that attracted my notice. A lot of loud-mouthed, raucous crows squawked at me whenever I walked to the grocery store, cutting across one parking lot to the next.

Who are they?

I'm no stranger to the bird of my Corvus line, an ancestry of Norman, French Swiss, and Irish, who take their heraldic symbol from the large black crow. Whenever I cawed back at them, they answered me every single time, being the excellent and highly intelligent mimics that they are. The names on the stones read Bogert (http://books.google.com/books?id=WdwNExWb7_QC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=Jan+Bogert+New+York&source=bl&ots=aNFCMqTdtM&sig=5YRC7DNAO9ON14cu-meztwUv8nw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6FNBVMi-LajlsATNs4Eo&ved=0CEYQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Jan%20Bogert%20New%20York&f=fals), a family that I thought could be remnants of the old French Huguenots who sailed down the Hudson from Canada, looking for lumber and good farming, which is something this river valley has always had in abundance.

A historical marker: hidden, but also in plain sight.

Since then, I've read excerpts about the Bogerts (www.mytrees.com/ancestry/New-York/Died-1707/Bo/Bogert-family/Jan-Bogert-an001161-302.html), a prominent New York Dutch family who changed their name immediately upon arrival in New Amsterdam, when they began buying land in large parcels. 

A noisy family of crows circled overhead, whenever I came near.

And just like so much in my life, a seemingly random gaggle of circling, noisy black birds led me back in time to a place of big mythological significance to me, because not only am I heir to the oldest Métis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis) and Acadian roots of this New World, but I am also a descendant of the very first Dutch and British families, too.

Cemetery in wintertime.

Such is the nature of inheritance, in this Autumn time when the old spirits and the new mingle in the air over cemeteries from times long past, beckoning to me again and again, by no mere accident or quirk of chance. That's the power of fate.

Ah, yes. This is no accident or random event.

When our local historian, who is also one of our librarians, told me that the old Bogert farm was near a large well and the encampments of two Indian tribes, I had to smile because deep down, I already knew it. I felt it in my bones, just as the crows called it out to me showily, heralding aloud that I had arrived safely home, from travels near and far, surviving adventures both small and frightful, big and powerful, dangerous and heady, just like my ancestors had.  I'm back, and I'm ready to share my story with all of you. 

Marker I.

Marker II.

Hudson Valley: Old Stone Walls

Cornerstone.

I've always loved the old stone walls scattered around Rockland. 
Some are stranded in the middle of the woods like something out of a 
fairy tale, to be happened upon in the middle of a hike as remnants of an old homestead, and others are still part of the landscape, serving their original purpose by demarcating property lines. 

Stone remnants.

They tie us back to our old farm roots, those of the Dutch, Irish, English, and Huguenot woodsmen settlers, frontiersmen, and farmers who created the first US nation. Plus, I just think they look better than other types of fences. They fit this landscape in a way that's right for this rocky land, a seamless blend of nature and design.

Stone wall and picket fence.

Cottage life: http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/cottages/.

Faith: The Madonna

Our Mother Mary.

Another nice aspect about homecomings are the natural similarities 
we feel in the surroundings we grew up with. There are a dearth of Catholics in my hometown, and I didn't really feel the impact of 
that until I moved to the Mid West, where there's a religion called "Christianity" that's about as wacky and dissimilar to Roman Catholicism as a glass of tap water with ice cubes from your freezer 
is to an iceberg: both elemental, but as different as forms of water 
that one can get.

Here, I see signs of my faith everywhere, in the form of something we call "Madonna in a bathtub", because years ago, people submerged a bathtub into the ground and put a statue of Mary in the center of the arch the tub created, to symbolize visions of her in a grotto (ex:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Lourdes). Nowadays, they handily sell statues with a pretty eggshell blue background background (Mary's color), which saves Catholics quite a bit of work.

As I walk around, it's nice to know that I can save myself a bit of work too, on lengthy explanations. I'm not naturally loquacious. It was something I worked hard to learn in school and then develop on the job over the years because I had to, in order to explain the sometimes extraordinarily difficult concepts I deal with daily. I'm naturally shy, so whenever I can say something with an image over hours of sometimes wasted talk, I'm happy to go with that instead.  

Silence is a great blessing.

Got faith? Me, too: http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/faith/.

The House of Doucette

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doucet

Every day I'm reminded about the rarity of my heritage, because I carry my name with me everywhere I go. And every single day of my life, it's mispronounced or misspelled, either from ignorance or spite. Some of it's prejudice against the French left over from WWII, or news items that depict France as a spoiled Euro child who hates the evil American McDonald's, valid points both. I write this in the hopes that it will bear repeating among my readers, so that I won't have to deliver such a speech again: I AM NOT FRENCH. Let me tell you who I am.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadians

I am descended from The Huguenots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugenots who were expelled from France for political reasons, 

to settle in Nova Scotia as Acadians, then after The Expulsion, were dispersed through force. Some became the Cajuns of New Orleans ("Cajun" is a corruption of the term "Acadian"), some went south to the Colonies (hello, me), and some disappeared into the woods, never to be heard from again, becoming a blend of European and Native American called The Métis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Métis_people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadians

This is the history of a people so brutalized, oppressed, and terrorized, that for many of us, our name is all we have left, after every trace of our culture and history was burned or destroyed or taken from us. I'm fortunate that my ancestor, Pierre Doucet, was an indentured servant to a wealthy sea captain, granting him the freedom to determine his fate in a somewhat better measure. He died, leaving behind a diary, which my family is blessed to have. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pitretrail/myline/paternal/pdoucet.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_Scotia

So the next time you are tempted to try an "exotic" name, ostensibly to show your worldly sophistication, I would ask that if you have any lingering doubts as to the correct pronunciation, ask first. Because you just might be addressing a fighter, who takes questions later.

http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2011/11/inconvenient-truths.html