The Lord Be With Us

While in Trois-Rivières, I stayed at Françoise & Armand's home for a couple of days and they are very "chaleureux". I've stayed with them twice before and every time they make me feel like family. Merci beaucoup.

I left T-R on Friday and headed out with a plan of avoiding Montréal once again, only this time I opted to go north and through St-Jérome on my way to the Gatineau area of Ottawa. On this particular day I noted something not because it was unusual (even though it was), rather because of how often I came across it. Well, in this area of the country anyway.

Each town I ride through generally has a very old church, vastly out of proportion in size when compared to the remainder of the homes in the villages. Many times, in front of the church, there'll be an icon of Jesus crucified on the cross or Mary standing amongst lambs, etc. fully decorated and painted. Fair enough. Again, that's been standard fair on the eastern leg of this trip. It's what I saw next that gave me cause for the double-take.

The first one I noticed was early in the day. A standard 3-bedroom bungalow in a normally-sized yard had this massive Jesus on the Cross up on a knoll in their front yard. This measured about 3m high x 2m across. Ok. A little weird perhaps but maybe there were special circumstances that drove these homeowners to want to do this. Then, a little ways down the road, another. Followed by a Mother Mary icon in the front yard, on a knoll of course in the next town. So, on and on this goes in this part of the province. I started thinking these were very selfless people, seeing that they had these statues all facing the roadway and not their home. I, on the other hand, would not want to be staring at their "behinds" so to speak and I'd have the darn thing facing the house. After all, drivers in vehicles would only see their backsides for a second or two.

I've mentioned before you have time to think while riding. Naturally, I continued to mull this whole issue around when it dawned on me that there was an angle slightly more intriguing than statue orientation. In some instances some homeowners would have their bedrooms in the front side of the house. If the house is facing west, they inevitably would go to bed on some nights in the shadow of the cross. The scenarios for what that implies are endless. A conjugal union? Now that would have to feel weird. Carrying this very likely scenario farther, at the height of the action, yelling out the Lord's name could result in some interesting consequences.
Creepy.

Still, ...