This is the story of how we housed a statue of Ste Thérèse for 15 years.
Fifteen years ago, my husband’s grandmother, Alice, was alive. She was a solid lady with thin white hair who pushed a walker with the determination of a person with hip-replacements who would not slow down. She befriended a lady forever referred to as Mrs. Teece. I don’t know how the name is spelled, but that is how it sounded. Mrs. Teece came into possession of a statue of Ste Thérèse. Having come from a church, the statue was four feet tall and weighed 80 pounds. At some point, maybe at Mrs Teece’s death, the statue was passed along to Alice who put it in her bedroom, or had it installed there, among other religious articles and porcelain dolls. And then one day, when one of Alice’s great grand-daughters was visiting, she noticed her effusive love of Ste Thérèse and decided that the statue should go to this great-granddaughter in Quebec next.
Death didn’t come immediately of course, not even sneakily in the night for Alice. It loitered a bit, sending her to a care home for a few months and then catching up with her in the hospital. The statue being what it was, heavy, and made of plaster, could not accompany Alice to her final bedrooms, and so found a stay in our house, being that my husband was this great-granddaughter’s uncle. We put the statue in a corner of our dining room. It felt like having a visitor, since our dining room was reserved for visitors and we normally ate in the kitchen. Seeing a giant statue in someone else’s home tour pushed me to consider Ste Thérèse a bit of unique decor.
I dusted her black veil and the crevasses in her dress folds and the creases of the roses that clustered around the crucifix she held. A visiting priest once took interest in the statue and appraised its solidity by examining the paint for hairline cracks. Meantime, she popped into pictures. Meantime we repainted the walls and changed the decor. We moved Ste Thérèse downstairs. We stopped paying attention to the angles of our picture-taking.
And then, just the other day, it was arranged that these people from Quebec, coming to Manitoba by air to pick up a vehicle bought here, could bring Ste Thérèse with them, to have her, as it was intended 15 years ago, given to this great-granddaughter. The internet recommends bubble wrap and tape. I found videos on lashing packages. Double boxing can be done for delicate things, but seemed like a step too far. Christian bought bubble wrap. He brought up the 80 pound plaster statue from downstairs. I wrapped and taped the Ste Thérèse and tied a mask to her face as a Covid precaution. Her life-size realism sometimes made us think of her as a character in our house. Would she rather stay here? Could divine events make it so that her story ended with us? Could she crumble into pieces as protest?
Christian loaded her into the car and I added bubble wrap to her base. After supper, I drove to St Boniface and found the Quebec visitors talking around the cleared dinner-table of their friendly hosts. I sat with them. As the sky darkened we eventually left the chairs, eventually also the apartment and the building for the parking lot and the statue was taken from my car to their van as rain wet the asphalt. She was seat-belted into place and I took a picture that was nothing but a blur under street-lights.