Stream of Memory: Reflections of Megantic County

Wendy Johnston is a freelance writer.

This slim volume of memoirs provides an evocative account of a childhood
and youth spent in Quebec’s Eastern Townships and Montreal in the
1930s and 1940s, and chronicles the author’s adult efforts to grapple
with her past.

Born in 1927 in New Britain, Connecticut, M. Laurel Buck spent her
early childhood in Megantic County, a region opened in the late 1820s
and early 1830s by immigrants who left the northern counties of Ireland,
the Isle of Aran, and Yorkshire. Buck fondly remembers her maternal
grandparents (descendants of the early Irish settlers), and presents a
detailed portrait of their farm, where she lived as a young child and to
which she returned regularly for summer vacations after her parents had
moved on to better economic opportunities in the industrial mecca of
Montreal. A profound attachment to family, community, and the land
emerges from these well-written pages. The book contains some lyrical
images of rural life, as the author describes the spring stream flowing
through the cellar of her grandparents’ farmhouse and another stream
in the maple grove of her paternal grandparents’ former farm. But the
author’s nostalgia does not banish the harsher realities of life or
the sadness of existence. These engaging and moving memoirs also offer
glimpses into the anguish of exile, the difficult transition to urban
life, and the emotional burden of family tragedy long silenced. At the
end of this personal journey, the reader is left wanting more, yearning
to peer more closely at the cast of characters, the landscapes, and the
events that compose the richly textured past of M. Laurel Buck.