Dedicated to the Song (at the end of this reflection) composed by Dr. Lena Allen-Shore- “I Prayed in Jerusalem at the Wall for the Peace of the World” – previously posted, and now to celebrate Jerusalem Day 5786 with the hope that peace reigns eternal

I woke up to the Piaf-like voice, rising to my bedroom from the living room downstairs. Although it resounded more melodious and less full, the accent in English was a mixture of Paris and Jaslo, heavier on the Paris, yet, charmingly soft. The piano vibrations held a resonance of treble, and I did not feel the deep lull of a bass. The lateness of the hour and the seemingly acute awareness which appears after tranquil sleep and tends, suddenly, to make up the child in us a philosopher, combined with the richness of the melody to nudge an overflow of emotions into an all-encompassing imagery. Suddenly, all the pieces of the life of the person of whom I had been thinking came together, as if I had been intoxicated by an embrace of intuitive comprehension. I sat at the top of the stairs and envisioned the scene.

My mother sat on a small, square, gold, four-legged, Louis XVI stool. The upholstered seat was flatly pillowed, sky blue, the same colour as the rest of the living room, including the curtains, except for the gold rim on the moldings, just below the ceilings.

Being a child, it took me awhile to realize that this living room was actually a salon and that all the other living rooms, I had seen in Montreal were not large dens without books. The furniture, paintings, sculpture, in the salon, like the inhabitants of the home, except for my one and only Canadia-born brother, had immigrated according to my mother’s wishes, from our 7 rue Raynouyard, 16th arrondissement, Paris apartment, across the street from the park from which the Trocadero and the Champs de Mars appeared. The large ornate gold -framed, rococo mirror, at the end of the wide, double- sized room, reflected the large chandelier and a white sculpture of the head of a smiling, little girl adorned in her braids. One of the two Persian, blue -motif carpets which covered the floor was visible in the middle of the room, from its far side.

A small, yet tall, circular beige marble table, also gold legged with a golden ledge, was centered so as to allow room for a large Louis XVI chair, now noticeably empty, where my father often sat, listened to my mother singing her songs, and frequently accompanying her by his harmonious whistling.

In the mirror, a barely visible sofa stood in the corner nook. All the material on the seats and on the backs of the chairs, as on the rest of the furniture, depicted colourful pastoral scenes inhabited by angels or young, regal, handsome men with their hair in buns and by dainty, painted pretty maidens. On the immediate, top left of the mirror hung a portrait of a fair lass embracing and being embraced by two cherubic children. The top right corner of the mirror exhibited a painting of guests in in a similar salon, although larger, which one would expect to find in a French palace; and a little further, the finest painting of all, from a museum, also in a gilded frame, like all the others of a dark haired, voluptuous gypsy, wearing a red bonnet and a black dress adorned with crimson, holding in her hands handiwork of flax. The profusion of red in the painting........

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