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© 2020 Donna Hébert. All rights reserved.

Today is National Acadian Day in Canada, marking the 1755 date when the British forcibly and brutally deported French Acadian settlers from Nova Scotia, some 11,500 of the 14,000 living there at the time. As history, this had essentially intellectual meaning for me until last year, when I learned that my 4th great grandfather had been deported from Grand Pré in 1755 at the age of 19. I pictured his family reacting to this outrage, pictured his mother weeping. He took 20 years to do it, but Etienne Hébert not only reunited his family, he brought hundreds of others from his Grand Pré community to Becancour, just south of Trois Rivières in Québec.

There was nothing dry any more about these real people who were my ancestors. Almost all my Québecois ancestors originally settled in and were driven from Acadie. Some of them still rest in the cemetery at Fort Anne in downtown Annapolis Royal. None of this was known to us until 2019, when one of the genealogists at the Annapolis Heritage Society took on my search.

As a very closeted Franco-American, I grew up in a family where our French-ness wasn’t important or even mentioned much. My parents didn’t bring their heritage into daily life. French-Canadian was the common term in the 1950s and Franco-American as an identity came into use in the 1970s. As it was, only one of my three French-Canadian grandparents spoke the language daily. She was my father’s mother, Clara Hébert Hinds . She chattered away with her friend Josée from across the street but when I asked her why she didn’t teach us to speak French, Nana replied, “Little pitchers have big ears.” As an adult, I saw that French was her private language where she didn’t have to watch what she said, a sanctuary. She attended Mass in French almost every day, said her rosary in French but, born in Franklin NH, she still considered herself American, not French-Canadian, and I never once heard her call herself Acadian.

Nana was highly skilled with a needle. Women and men sought her out. She altered and repaired clothing, made new dresses and wedding party outfits and also repaired the zippers in old men’s woolen trousers, not a task I would have enjoyed. She taught me how to position patterns to cover every scrap of fabric when cutting out material. She often inherited the leftovers from her custom work and would find an artful way to use them.

Nana would turn on the radio to listen to the station in Québec late at night and sew while Papa worked the night shift at the woolen mill. The Singer sewing machine and ironing board were in her bedroom. When I was little, I’d sleep in the big double bed behind the machine, letting the motion of the treadle and the sound of music in French lull me to sleep.

For all that, my family was so thoroughly assimilated that I wasn’t aware of my own French-ness at the gut level, as an actual birthright that I already carried within me, until I met Josée Vachon in the early 1990s. Sitting around Martha Pellerin’s dinner table with her and other French women, I realized that our busy conversational rhythm was comfortable, breaking up into duets and jumping back in with comments about what someone else just said. There was a give and take there that has never been part of Yankee conversational etiquette. I felt at home. Even if I didn’t speak French much (and that, badly), these were my people. I belonged. For several decades, every time I cross into Quebec, and now, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, my eyes fill with tears and there’s a sense of homecoming. 

I still feel that way. I understand myself better knowing that many things about me are French, in the blood, can’t be removed even if I tried (and why would I do that?). I understand that the music of my French-Canadian ancestors, Acadian and Québecois, flows like their DNA through my veins and down my arms. Speaking French may still be tough, but my fiddle speaks it fluently for me and now I know who I am . . . and I think Nana knows, too.

Here’s her song, called “Nana Danced.” I wrote it back in the ’90s, when I was singing in Chanterelle with Josee Vachon, Liza Howe Constable and Alan Bradbury.

© 1994 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved. Recorded on “Soirée Chez Nous” in 1996 with Chanterelle. Written for her French-Canadian Nana, who really did die of a heart attack while playing sixteen cards at Bingo.

© 2020 Donna Hébert. All rights reserved.

The provincial government called us today for only the second time during our quarantine. The caller said to expect a call daily from now till Monday, so I guess this is when most quarantiners bolt for the beach! No worries. There’s enough room here for Bob to do a mile walking the yard perimeter 8 times.

As for me, did I mention the spit-shined kitchen? All shiny clean and white, it will undergo this year’s first ordeal by blueberry jam pretty soon. Depends on whether the Co-op has five-pound boxes of blueberries. Five pounds, $15. In US$, that’s $11.32. Really. First year here, I bought 15 pounds and it didn’t gel much, but I tell you that blueberry drool was the best ever! I don’t think there’s any left.

A more pressing concern is that our well is running pretty low. We had a thimbleful of rain this morning but we’ve been severely curtailing our water use as the recharging is taking its time in this drought. It’s chastening to note how profligate most of us usually are – us included – in our daily water use. Water is an essential of life and it’s not always easy to find, especially clean water. Our water source here is a natural spring. Nothing is added to it. What a blessing! My skin, hair and nails all testify to the purity of that water. We take that bounty – hot and cold from the taps in our homes – for granted and much of it just goes down the drain. We use our dishwasher, clothes washers, take long showers, irrigate our lawns and gardens, fill our swimming pools. It’s a lot of fresh water.

In Cape Breton right now, we’re showering every other day and doing dishes by hand once a day, waiting for almost a week to do laundry. We hang it out to dry because the dryer is still broken from last summer and it’s summer now, so we hang it out anyway. It’s getting to be the Arkansas Traveler’s dryer. Maybe this year we’ll get it fixed.

We are eyeing parts of the yard for changes, pointing out places to add more day lilies (photo) so we can see them from the deck. Bob is looking up how to submit soil tests in our search for the best place to put any new blueberries. We are thinking of allowing the white phlox to have its way with the patch near the garage and moving the day lilies so they will have some friends on the other side of the house. Bob says the phlox (photo) was in situ when they bought the house, even before the garage was built.

As we discuss possible garden changes, I learn more of the history of how Bob and Jay put this place together. Her touch is everywhere, including a beautiful sea serpent sculpture named Emily near the other native apple tree. I tread gently here, making changes that make sense. I know she would approve of us getting rid of the pile of fill that has been there since they built the Ceilidh room.

This is the fallow year for the garden, the year we change its landscape and plan ahead for next year. Bob will give the native apple tree a haircut so we can see under it (photo). 

There will be a tiny apple harvest this year but last year’s was enormous and we still have several dozen quarts of applesauce here. One year balances another if you’re lucky. And seriously, hasn’t this been a year for taking stock, looking at resources and deciding how to go forward? It seems an appropriate response given the state of the world.

© 2020 Donna Hébert. All rights reserved.

In day eight of quarantine after entering Nova Scotia, my oppositional two-year-old self says “why do we have to just SIT here when we both feel FINE?” and my rational senior self says, “yes, you’re uncomfortable stuck here when you can hear the cars driving by and they’re GOING places. It’s only 6 more days. You’ll survive. Find something else to think about.”

Bob is doing all the yard-tidying he would have been doing in May and June, pushing the wheelbarrow and pruners from one clump of bushes to another.. He’ll come in soon – even with a breeze it’s in the mid-80s, 30C. Me, I have pretty much spit-shined the kitchen and am considering ordering the five pound box of blueberries from the co-op and some new jar lids, pectin, and 4 kilos of sugar and making jam first thing tomorrow morning before it gets too hot. Then again, if it’s too hot, do I really want to make jam? We have plenty of pint jars and screw tops here. In Athol we use them as drinking glasses but then mason jars are multipurpose containers.

We are experimenting with managing the coolness of the house without air conditioning. Fact is I breathe better without it. One of the blessings of this being an island is that there is always a breeze. If we open the windows and shady side-doors, we can keep air flowing through the house. It stays cool during the day and once the sun moves over the house, we open another door for air flow through what Bob and Jay called the Ceilidh room. I look forward to the time when we can fill the room with people again and play music. Till then, we have two porches, one that’s screened and I can play music on both of them with Bob. I think we’ll survive a few more days dreaming of the music to come!