Knowing by Heart
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These columns were originally published in the Kings County Record between 1984 and 2016.
The illustrations are by Alice, most of the photographs are by Lee

Remembrance of things past

1/10/2016

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​© R. L. Whitney, originally published 3 December 2014 issue.

It will be 40 years ago next August when we came into New Brunswick for the first time. As we made our way beyond McAdam toward the Trans-Canada, late afternoon sunlight made the trees and cleared patches glow as though lit from within.

We came around a corner and saw, in the field beside us, a young man plowing with a beautiful team of chestnut-coated horses. I can still see that momentary glimpse in my mind’s eye. It was so different from Toronto!

We had come to Toronto in 1962. Our coming, we thought, was temporary. We did not intend to live in a city beyond the time it took to get the education I was seeking.  
I had been teaching at a Negro college in Tidewater Virginia for the previous three years and hoped to go back to such a college later. But plans have a way of changing. 

Picture
We became Canadian citizens in 1970, by which time I had a position teaching at the U. of T.

Straight from Tidewater Virginia, we had come to Canada with a VW Beetle, a six-month old daughter and a dog. When we pulled up at the border at Queenston I was asked why I was coming to Canada. I said I was coming up to study. “Where?” they asked. “At the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies,” I said. The agent riffled through sheets presumably containing the names of all the schools known to the government. At last he spoke. “Is that a hair-dressing salon?” Once we got that straightened out, we were let into the country on a student visa - the Beetle, the luggage, and perhaps the dog, coming along under the heading of Settler’s Effects. It had never occurred to us that a sovereign nation might want a bit of advance notice of immigration. Those were innocent days!

In the course of the years that followed we moved about the city, the family grew to six, the dog died, and we became part of a community through our involvement in a Montessori school, and members of another community because we were interested in overseas adoption.

It was that second community that had us driving east 40 years ago. One of the families we met through overseas adoption meetings had suggested we jointly look for a piece of property north of Toronto, where we could take the kids on weekends to enjoy a bit of life away from the rush of the city. To our surprise we had gotten a letter from them saying they had come down to New Brunswick to visit an old friend and, oh, by the way, “we bought a farm.” And so, that August, we set out to see what this was all about.

And so it happened, on a warm summer evening in mid August, as our host drove from their farm with some trash for the dump in Collina, that I noticed, sitting above the road, a small house and sturdy, straight-backed barn, highlighted in the sunset on the hill behind them, and two signs at the bottom of the driveway. One sign, in faded blue and white, proclaimed the property a “Century Farm” and the other proclaimed the property “For Sale.”

The next day - Wednesday - we went to see, and Thursday morning as well. Friday morning we made, in one of the maddest cases of impulse buying, an offer. Around noon the phone rang at our friends’ place. The offer had been accepted. Saturday morning we climbed into our car and started back to Toronto.

The next summer we came down for the few weeks between the end of the kids’ school year and the beginning of mine and discovered just how far a thousand miles was. To our surprise the family whose home it had been had planted a garden for us, and the feeling grew upon us that here was a good place - good not in the abstract but concretely - a good place to be.

The next year I had a sabbatical leave from the university and we decided to spend it at the farm. The children, those who were in school, would go to the local schools, on the bus - a new experience for city kids. The Saturday after their first week of school we bought an elderly Jersey cow we named Brownie, and I, with the help of a kindly neighbour, began learning to milk a cow by hand.

​Like the sight of the young man plowing with horses, it seemed an opening into another, and appealing, world.
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    Words & Images

    We moved to our farm in Sussex, New Brunswick from Toronto in 1977, only moving away in 2014. 

    For over 30 years of our life there, I wrote a weekly column for the Kings County Record in Sussex chronicling the little events that are the heart of ‘daily life’ in a small place in the country.  These blog posts are drawn from those columns.

    The weekly column became, over the years, a series of bench-marks or surveyor’s stakes to record the contours of the place we lived, its dreaming hills and fertile valleys, icy chasms and swift-flowing streams. 

    While I no longer live on the farm, we continue to share the columns from time to time on this blog.  And very soon you will be able to read my book!  To be published in December 2019.  

    ----
    Images on the blog are drawn from my own photography,  and my wife Alice's artwork.  We occasionally resort to other people's images when nothing we have on hand suits the content of the post.  

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