Our family and the story of the little red parrot.
I am the eldest of the third generation in this story, Georges Huet and Bertha Servais’s first granddaughter.
I was born in May 1977 and my grandfather left us much too soon scarcely a year later.
I know that I am the fruit of a long series of lives and families and carry the heritage of my four grandparents, four people who shared the traits of courage, hard work, rigour, tenacity and love of nature and things well done because done with the heart.
Living with my maternal grandmother also gave me great joy.
The very shy little girl I was at the start managed little by little, through effort, resilience, experience and experimentation, travel and meeting people, to become a fine person. The path is long, hard and demanding, but it is so beautiful, too!
And through courage and hard work, Isabelle was able to find her little red parrot.
I worked alongside the second generation between 2000 and 2014 and from 2018 to December 2019. That is when our paths finally took different directions, and for the better.
When I started working in the timber industry with my business school training, I knew nothing and was one of the first women in a very masculine, macho sector.
I honed my skills and took my place. I was also unaware, without knowing it, of the fact that what I thought was a shiny medal was of the blackest black on the other side.
Today, the little red parrot fears nothing and no one and has a great hunger for justice and truth.
It is said that the apple never falls far from the tree, but this apple is perhaps of a radically different shape and colour from that of the parent stock. And so much the better.
I am not disowning my past or my forebears, for they enabled me to become who I am, and through the worst. But so much the better, for one learns the most from adversity, right?
Today, at the age of 46, I have my entire life to live MY life according to MY precepts and MY way, with the values and virtues of courage, calm, joy, pleasure and justice as a backdrop; a return, as I see it, to the past and tremendous values.
As Paul Johnson so rightly wrote in one of his biographies of Winston Churchill:
« Indeed, in addition to the importance of hard work, the 4 other lessons from Churchill’s remarkable life were:
- To aim high
- To never allow mistakes or criticism to get you down
- To waste no energy on grudges, duplicity or infighting
- To make room for JOY
Even during the war, he never lost his sense of humor, he never lost sight of what was beautiful in the world; and he never came to be cynical”
