Inheritance by Weathering

A walk through St. Boniface, Winnipeg's French quarter, makes Leaf confront her own lack of connection to the past. Surrounded by deep-rooted history, she wonders if it’s possible to build a legacy when you don’t have one to inherit.

I don't have a history like this. My family tree is more of a shrub, patchy and prone to dropping leaves unexpectedly. We don't have deep roots; we have shallow, tangled ones that we packed up and moved every few years. So walking through St. Boniface feels like visiting another planet. Here, history isn't just in a museum; it's in the street names, the French on the ghost signs, the heavy stone of the cathedral that burned but refused to fall. It’s in the air.

"'Savon St. Jean,'" Leo says, pointing to a faded sign above a boulangerie. "St. Jean Soap. Even their ghosts are bilingual."

"It makes me feel like a ghost myself," I admit, watching a family walk past, chattering in French. "Like I'm just floating through someone else's story."

"It's your story too," he says. "You live here. This is Winnipeg history."

"It's not my history, though. It's just... history. It’s like reading a book about a king. It's interesting, but he's not my grandpa. My grandpa sold insurance in Calgary. Nobody's carving his name into a monument."

Leo launches into the story of Louis Riel, of the voyageurs, of the clash of cultures that forged Manitoba. He's good at it. His voice fills with passion, and he uses his hands, sketching maps in the air. I listen, but I'm not hearing the dates and the names. I'm hearing the echo of something I've never had: a direct, unbroken line to a place. A story that belongs to you so completely you don't even have to think about it.

"Does it feel heavy?" I ask when he pauses for breath.

"What?"

"All of it. Knowing you're the next link in a long chain. Doesn't it feel... heavy?"

"I guess I've never thought of it that way," he says. "It feels more like an anchor."

"Exactly!" I say. "Anchors hold you in one place. They stop you from drifting. But they also stop you from sailing."

"Says the girl who thinks a leaky raft is a yacht," he shoots back, but there's no heat in it. We've had this argument a hundred times in a hundred different ways.

---

We wander over to the St. Boniface Cathedral. The old stone façade stands open to the sky, a beautiful, skeletal ruin against the new, modern church built inside it. It’s a perfect metaphor for this city—always building something new inside the shell of something old.

The grounds are quiet, peaceful. The afternoon sun filters through the massive trees, dappling the manicured lawns. We drift into the cemetery next to it, the oldest in the city. The headstones are worn smooth by wind and time, their inscriptions in French, barely legible.

Here, the weight of history is undeniable. Generations of the same families, buried side-by-side. Names repeated over and over, a roll call of the people who built this place. It's a family tree carved in granite.

Leo walks the rows slowly, reading the names, a historian in his natural habitat. I hang back, feeling like an intruder. This is a private conversation between a place and its people, and I don't speak the language.

### A Familiar Stone

I watch Leo trace the carved letters on a leaning stone pillar. It’s strangely intimate. I wonder if this is what he wants—a life so rooted that you know exactly where your bones will end up.

He suddenly stops, stock-still. He's staring at a simple, grey headstone, half-covered in moss. It's not grand or imposing like the others around it. It's small, plain.

"Leo?" I call out. "Find someone famous?"

He doesn't answer. He kneels down, his hand hovering over the stone, much like I did with the mural in the alley. He reaches out and pulls away some of the moss, revealing the name carved beneath a simple cross.

He looks back at me, and his face is completely blank. All the passion, all the historical certainty, is gone. He looks like he's the one seeing a ghost.