It’s the first of November and so it is All Saints' Day. For those who don’t know: “it’s a Christian festival celebrated in honour of all the saints, known and unknown.” Yes, I copied that of wikipedia (the only website that justifies the existence of the internet - but this aside). If you’re french, you knew, because it’s a big thing here. The french go to their cemeteries to place flowers on the graves of friends and family. It’s always the first of November and it’s always (ok, almost always) the same flower: a chrysanthemum in a pot, varying in color, from white to yellow to pink to purple. Why a chrysanthemum in a pot, I’ve asked numerous french. Because I personally think a more aesthetic choice could have been made… But most answers point in a very practical direction: because they stay fresh and flowery for a long time. I dont’t know if there’s a more romantic, mythic or historic explanation (wikipedia doesn’t tell) but since a few years, I’ve also embraced this tradition.
The Bayet cemetery is small and rural and quiet and has some of those small and ancient buildings on it (that you rarely see in Holland but a lot in southern European countries) that serve as a grave. One of those keeps in memory the former family that lived at Château des Edelins for almost 300 years, the De Bar family.
It’s not my family, but I do feel a connection to those who have lived in the same rooms as my family and I. Those who’ve planted trees that are really big now. Those who’ve been lighting the same fireplaces, opening and closing the same shutters (hence the photo). And thinking about them and looking at the house, that’s founded by a De Bar in 1638, makes me humble. It’s a good feeling, knowing we’re just here to guard the house for a while. To make sure it stays in shape for the next generations to come. That I’m just a very small part of a long line of people occupying it. The house shows me, in a very practical chrysanthemum in a pot kind of way, that we’re just small grains of sand in history. It’s not that the world is spinning around me. It’s - at the most - me, who tries her best to help the earth to keep on spinning in a healthy way.
And it is that feeling, that sense of existence, that I want to pass over to my girls: be humble, take care of the world around you and don’t place yourself at the centre of things. And so every first of November, we bring those less-aesthetic chrysanthemums to our cemetery, we think about all the saints, known and unknown, and I’m honoured that I can can be a part of that tradition.