The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [45]
I am a woman who lost my relationship. Then I lost my nonprofit job to the California economy. Then I lost my home. I was tethered to nothing. There was nothing to take stock of. I did not know what to do or where to go. Then my aunt in Holland, who was very much like a second mother to me, died of cancer. Several years ago, she and my mother bought a three-hundred-year-old stone house together in this rural area of Lorraine, in the wooded rolling hills of les Vosges. The house normally stands empty in the winters. Now it stands even emptier.
Lorraine is like a weary child of divorce; it has stood in the middle of countless gruesome and bloody custody battles with Germany for centuries, unsure of where its allegiance lies, deep in identity crisis. Steeped in a mish-mash of Gallo-Roman, Catholic, and Pagan traditions, it is awkward and gawky. With a shift away from small-farm agriculture and a decline in the mining industry in the early half of the twentieth century, its economy collapsed in a mass exodus of its population to Paris and the sunnier climes of the south. Now, most of the villages are deserted and still during the mist of fall and the sleet of winter. There are a few local farmers who eek out a meager living from their cattle or sheep, and laborers in the building trade who restore vacation houses for the Dutch and Germans. In the summer, the villages mirror the landscape and spring back to life. But in the winter, people do not come here. Except for me, because I decided that deep in my own identity crisis and depression, coming to a frozen stone home with no telephone or internet in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere somehow would be a good idea. I admit that I romanticized it, and I realize my error the moment I arrive. But in a way, this gray landscape holds a perfect mirror to my heart in its weary state, and I stay for months.
My mother and aunt’s house is in a village called Serécourt and sits on a road just above the village called “Haut de Fée.” Literally, this is translated as “High Faerie,” but I soon discover that it signifies a “faerie mound,” which has pagan folklore surrounding it. The only neighbor on the Haut de Fée is the cemetery around the bend. There are no other houses on the road, which winds from the church to the cemetery before disappearing between cow pasture and into the woods. This may be because, as I discover, faerie mounds are burial mounds, magical places where the veil between the living and the dead is thin, and in a superstition-soaked region, one is not supposed to build houses on faerie mounds because it generally upsets the faeries. I guess whoever built my mother and aunt’s house didn’t get the memo. As my fertile imagination begins to run at night while I sleep in my recently deceased aunt’s bedroom, I am both comforted by that thought, as well as spooked when I begin to hear faint voices and singing in the house late at night. I start to doubt my sanity, but the sound is unmistakable.
The nearest neighbors, an older, reserved Dutch couple named Hans and Elizabeth, walk by the house one day, and I strike up a conversation. I tell them about my experience, and they sheepishly admit that yes, they have heard some singing too, that they too have heard voices late at night in their house, and that Elizabeth has even seen what she thought was a group of nuns late one night in the footpath between their house and the former convent, now the summer home of a wealthy Parisian publisher. Hans and Elizabeth live in a 400-year-old house that has seen many ill-fated occupants. In World War II, a Jewish butcher lived there. He was taken away to the concentration camps. During the French Revolution, their house was used by the church, and the inhabitants wiped out along with most of the other villagers during the Reign of Terror, which