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© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

Southwest Margaree, where we live in Cape Breton, is part of the larger Inverness County, which stretches south to the Canso Strait and north past Cheticamp to the top of the Highlands. In spite of the distances involved among and between communities here, most people know a lot more about their neighbors than we would in the States and even though Bob’s lived here since the mid-90s, locals still know our house by the original owners’ name.

The neighborliness of island residents is very sweet. There’s a fabric of caring that goes beyond what Americans might consider nosiness. Of course people here want to know everything about you. You might be related, after all, and they never stop hoping you might turn out to be Scottish! Their grapevine for communicating with each other about you is also as legendary as their scenery. I think Bob knew this already from his years of living here but in the story I tell today, I was about to encounter this.

My second summer here, I was determined to make more jams. It was early July and I was looking for someone who grew strawberries, asking the Co-op if they knew anyone. We wanted flats, not little punnets.

The previous summer, I had met one of Inverness’s “women of the clan.” A retired nurse, Alice Freeman runs The Bear Paw, a very interesting gift store in downtown Inverness. As much a cultural center as a commercial enterprise, in The Bear Paw, you can explore the island’s cultural and musical heritage and even watch Alice weave throws in authentic island tartans. She doesn’t stop there but also sings in Scots Gaelic and has a fine singing voice. Alice is my senior by some years and she sports a black streak in her otherwise white hairdo. To call her anything but magnificent would be an understatement. Alice and women like her are the lifeblood of the community, running events, raising money, putting on shows, cooking, baking, and chivvying others into helping and doing what they can.

When I met her for the first time, within about three minutes, Alice had gently interrogated me about who I was, where I came from, and what was my mother’s mother’s name? And my father’s? The following summer, we stopped in to ask her if she knew anyone that grew strawberries. The store was closed but the sign said she’d be back soon. Alice keeps a bench outside the front door and we sat there to wait for her return. The view from the bench is of the Inverness beach so it’s no hardship to set awhile.

A good time later, a friend of hers joined us on the bench and proceeded to chat us up like a trained agent, asking where we lived in the Margarees and just kept us talking. Alice didn’t return and we had to leave, but we had left the important snippet of information behind. We were looking for strawberries.

The photo you see above is what greeted us on the kitchen porch the next morning. Bob and I put two and two together, looked at each other, and said, “Alice!” She admitted that her friend had mentioned we were looking for them, confirming what Alice already knew. Where we lived. She also told us the Co-op would have strawberry flats in a week.

I want to be Alice when I grow up.

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all right reserved.

There’s a swing to the seasons here. People wait-wait-wait-wait and then wait some more for summer to finally arrive but when it does, BAM! They plant things, travel, go dancing (sadly not this year, though), eat out (many restaurants close in the off-season) and remind themselves why they put up with the long, dark winter. They also work their tails off all summer because this is a tourist destination. Still, summer is worth the wait. 

On Sunday, Bob and I took one of our favorite drives up the Cabot Trail through Cap Lemoine and Chéticamp, where we had coffee at the Frog Pond Cafe, going on through the Cape Breton Highlands as far as Pleasant Bay, where we stopped at the Rusty Anchor for a truly magnificent dinner. We drove over the mountain where, in winter, the snow can get to 20 feet and the school bus still has to get through. 

Bob likes to tool along on the Trail imagining he’s a British race car driver but I threw a spoke in that, asking to stop every few minutes when I saw something to photograph. Today’s essay is largely photographic and musical. All photos were shot with my iPhone. Looking for photo ops gave a nice feel to the trip. There were a lot of other people with the same idea – it’s Labour Day weekend up here too – but we managed to stay away from them. The most magical moment was at day’s end, when we stopped along the Margaree River. The play of light was magnificent. 

My 2002 solo version of “Neil Gow’s Lament” fit as a theme for this YouTube slideshow. Bob is wearing his “dance Cape Breton” tee and that’s a homemade blueberry lemonade on the table at the Rusty Anchor in Pleasant Bay. The treeless landscape at the beginning is Cap St. Joseph LeMoine and opening photo is the Mi-Carème center there. The Cabot Trail runs inland of this peninsula. The Frog Pond Cafe just north of Chéticamp is a great place for espresso and mouth-watering oatcakes. The grandeur of the landscape from there on makes me wish I could paint. I’ll have to be satisfied with my iPhone camera. The sweet Margaree Valley in the fading light at the end is simply stunning.

That’s why we live here.

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

I come from generations of Québecois and Acadian farmers and millworkers. Even if my original Acadian ancestors were pioneers, their descendants worked in mills in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont from 1870-1970 and many also sent their children to work until the law put a stop to such things. Historically, education was for the wealthy, while the children of farmers and millworkers were expected to work as soon as they were able. We like to close our eyes to this reality, but child labor and effective slavery still exist in other parts of the world, where too many children make the clothes that fill our stores while simultaneously our own coddled darlings are taking music lessons. 

Until the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, children under 16 could be hired for factory work. Some states made education compulsory long before that but what really changed education was that 1938 law. Massachusetts led the states in instituting public education in 1852, while Mississippi, the last, took until 1918 to require it but after 1938, children stayed in school until at least age 16. 

The barons of industry that America spawned were empire-building, not underwriting reform and they weren’t concerned about educating their workers. They wanted productivity, reluctantly granting Sunday as a day of rest. Anyone who thinks that mill or factory work was or is easy, or that you wouldn’t choose to do something else if you could, needs their head and their privilege examined. People were regularly injured, maimed and killed with no compensation. My own grandfather was injured in his sixties as a mill repairman in the factory that had employed him for decades and they let him go, no compensation, nothing. He spent almost a year in the White River Junction VA Hospital recovering. Pre-OSHA, no Workmen’s Comp, of course. Injured, he still had to get another job when he got out of the hospital. 

In my youth, I tried factory work and failed three times. At age 17, I lasted only a few months in the basement of the Braverman shoe factory in Haverhill, and a year later, less than a summer in the Foster Grant sunglasses plant in Leominster. They took me to the emergency room halfway through my first shift at the D.D. Bean match factory in Jaffrey NH when I had an asthma attack from the particulate matter in the air. I’d have been dead of TB before puberty a hundred years ago in the mills. As it was, my father, who worked in mills and factories his whole life, was deaf by his mid-fifties, while his later dementia could be linked to the chemicals he handled for decades. And let’s talk money: millworkers, factory workers, the people who actually finish the job someone else started, are not getting rich. Since the ‘80s, the U.S. has been on a union-busting spree, so in fact, it’s getting worse, not better, for workers. 

The people who physically built this country – slaves, indentured servants, construction, steel, railroad and factory workers – didn’t get much back in return, nor did they accumulate enough wealth to enrich their inheritors as the/their owners did. Their collective labor, taken for little, if not taken altogether by slavery, also collectively enriched a powerful few whose own descendants continue to influence our lives today in ways large and small.

Mamie Laberge, in the photo above taken by muckraking photographer Lewis Hine, has inheritors who may not work in an American factory but you can bet they work in factories somewhere in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China or Indonesia and that companies in America sell what they make. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn I’m wearing an item of clothing from a questionable source without knowing it. In fact, I’d bet on it. 

Maybe I should go back to making my clothes again. I owe it to Mamie.

PHOTO CAPTION: Mamie’s photo, taken in 1913, struck me hard when I first saw it. She could have been me but instead of being a millworker, I’m a songwriter. I wrote “The Shuttle,” when I was singing with Josée Vachon and Liza Constable in Chanterelle. This track is from the Smithsonian/Folkways CD anthology “Mademoiselle Voulez-Vous Danser?”

To learn more about the history of Franco-Americans in New England, see:

David Vermette’s “A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans.” Baraka Books, Montréal

Charles Scontras in the Lewiston Maine Sun-Journal, “Society Turned to Prejudice to Justify Exploiting French-Canadian As Labor”  

© 2020 Donna Hébert. All rights reserved.

This is a peaceful place 96% of the time. The other four percent can be noisy what with cars, motorcyles, and the occasional grumbling semi hauling stripped logs. Doesn’t bother me much, though. It seems a small caveat to the relative peace and quiet here. Also, in the winter, when that quiet seems to last forever, it’s good to be on the main road and only a mile from the power station! 

Speaking of peace and quiet, I refer only to man-made noises. It’s a blessing to hear no leaf blowers, lawn mowers, or loud music. That’s a heavenly absence, but the roar of the wind, which we get two days out of seven on average, is another matter. Inland, it gets to 50 kph regularly, rushing through all the trees. Last year one of the derelict spruces toppled, luckily falling uphill away from the house. Along the coast, in Chéticamp, le bon vent gets up to 90 kph, with little or no tree cover for a mile or more inland. Sometimes the wind wins.

On mild days, when the breeze is still strong enough to foil the bugs, we’ve been making music on the back deck. The front porch is screened and we often eat there but the back deck is for sunny mornings and coffee and for music after the sun is over the roof when the bugs aren’t too ferocious. 

Bob set up the video camera to catch me playing a few tunes this week. I’ve been teaching these in my weekly Fiddling Demystified classes for the Philadelphia Folksong Society’s Folkschool and I told the class I’d post some tunes here for them. The class has run from April 15 and I’ll continue as long as people keep showing up, since all I need is bandwidth and a reason to talk about fiddling! We meet Wednesdays at 5 pm EDT for an hour and we welcome new class members. It’s not expensive and since each class is separate, you can take just one or as many as you wish. The signup form is online at https://folksongsociety.wufoo.com/forms/virtual-fiddling-demystified/. If our class time is inconvenient, all the classes were recorded and archived and you can order them for streaming on the same signup form. 

I’m always looking for new perspectives in fiddling, so last April, I started an ‘upside down’ fiddle class, looking first at theory. Most players have some reading skills and as fiddlers, we focus primarily on melodies. Instead of doing that, I started off with the most common minor chord progression in fiddling, E Dorian, with an Em and a D chord. You already know a dozen tunes in this pattern if you play fiddle. We progressed to other common chord patterns in different regional styles, learning to follow the chords and try out harmony under these patterns rather than learning the tunes themselves. 

After several months in the harmony sandbox (Dorian, Mixolydian, Diatonic, and Pentatonic), we moved on to creating rhythm with bowing patterns in jigs, reels, marches and waltzes. Then, we began looking at tone production – the art of sounding the way you want to sound. At this point, I still wasn’t really teaching tunes and I was amazed that folks stayed with me. These fiddlers are as obsessed as I am! Some of the melodies I used were familiar to class members and others were new but all were chosen to illustrate the techniques being examined rather than being taught as melodies themselves. 

I don’t know about other fiddlers but tone production wasn’t something I even thought about until I was in my thirties. A series of lessons with Boston Symphony violinist Mary Lou Speaker in the 1970s taught me bow techniques for enabling expression and emotion but, to this day, I continue to chase my ability to express what I feel in the music. Some days what I play is sublime, others, it’s just a bunch of notes. The elusive perfect tune always beckons. It’s what keeps us playing! 

These are not perfect tunes I’m playing here but they are tunes that I love to play. When we got around to learning melodies in class, I started with (big surprise!) the music of my French-Canadian ancestors. While recording one of these on the deck, my loud feet also made the camera wiggle a bit, so I’ll put a pillow under my feet next time. C’est la vie!

Four of these tunes are from Louis Beaudoin, one of my mentors in the 1970s. He taught me my first crooked tune, Isidore’s Reel in G.

Here are two other crooked tunes from Mr. Beaudoin, both in D: La Grondeuse/La Grande Gigue Simple. The bottom (G) string is tuned up one step to A. Remember to compensate – for an open (tempered) tuning, I tune the E string down a smidge and raise the D about the same amount. The fiddle should ring when any pair of strings is bowed.

Here’s another of his: Fireside Reel in G. 

Here’s a march, L’air Mignon, by Simon Riopel, in G.

The last piece is one of my favorites, La Valse des Jouets in D, by Québecois composer, singer, and songwriter Michel Faubert.

Video links are from my new YouTube playlist for the Fiddling Demystified Class. Enjoy!

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

It’s amazing how quickly I adapted to being in what I perceive as a safe place. I could feel my shoulders drop down to normal from the moment we pulled away from Canadian customs. Now, for the first time in many months, I could breathe freely. It was a seductive feeling – one that disappeared yesterday in the Margaree Forks Co-op. Waiting in line for checkout, I noticed that BOTH cashiers were wearing their masks so loosely and under their noses that they were essentially unmasked. 

I remarked about it to others waiting in line, who’d also noticed, then got through the checkout and, returning my cart, mentioned to the woman sanitizing the cart that the cashiers were not in compliance and I would not be returning until they were properly masked. “Oh, but it’s so uncomfortable for them,” she said. Ummm . . . wrong answer. Hard as it was in that moment, I didn’t raise my voice (for one thing, she was properly masked) but I still said, “I don’t care how uncomfortable it is. People in medical jobs wore them all day every day even before the virus. This is a pandemic. If the cashiers won’t meet the legal requirements of their job, they should find another one.” Then I asked her, “How many people do you know who have died from or contracted this virus? You know, there are people I will never see again.” 

She wanted to take me to the manager but I was upset and I didn’t trust myself to maintain my cool (read burst into tears – don’t you hate that?) and of course, I’m a come-from-away American and this is the only grocery store in town. I was planning to call them when I got home. I scurried out, feeling my shoulders going up again, and was getting into the car when another employee came up and knocked on the window. It was the nice lady who’d taken my quarantine orders last month. She was masked and so was I so I rolled the window down and we had a conversation about what had just happened.

I told her that when people walk in and see the staff not in compliance, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. I reminded her that we had quarantined in our home, not leaving the property for two weeks, in order to protect Canadians from a possible infection we might be carrying. Then I asked her what Canadians were doing to protect us and themselves. “Please don’t get complacent here,” I begged her. “You don’t want to live like we are now in the States with the virus spiking everywhere. It’s a horror. I know people are tired of this but it’s not going away and you have to comply, no exceptions.” 

She took me seriously and promised to act on it. Today, I called the manager and had a great chat with her. All employees will be in full compliance from now on. Done, dusted, and solved. My faith in Canadians holds true but the lesson is that even though I feel and am really safer here, I still can’t let my guard down and I need to listen to my gut when it talks to me, especially when it shouts. 

I must note that this is the only time I have found sloppy compliance (and now I’m starting to hate that word) since we got here. Eating at the Seafood Stop,  The Dancing Goat and the Glenora Distillery, I felt completely safe, with tables distanced and everyone masked for a trip to the restroom. Restaurants here get your name, phone number, and email address to allow for contact tracing if necessary and hand you a sanitized pen to sign their book. The pharmacy in Inverness was also good and I felt fine in Antigonish both shopping and eating out. That’s why I was so shocked yesterday at the Co-op. It felt like I was yanked back into a battle zone. If I can get my knickers in a double twist over something this minor, imagine what my re-entry into the Untied (sic) States will look like in a few months.

Can I please, pretty please, stay here? I’ll play tunes for my supper!

 © 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved

My Nana made sweet pickles, not sour ones. Until I was at college and ordered a sub, my taste for pickles ran sweet. Truth to tell, it still does. It has to be a really good half-sour to grab me and forget those deep-fried dill pickles. Ummm . . . why would you take something already crispy and fry it flaccid? Food fail!

There was nothing improvisational about Nana’s pickles or piccalilli but they were delicious. There were no fancy flavorings (she was Acadian – we’re lucky they were salted). She used just the basics – sugar, salt, vinegar and pickling spices – but hers were the pickle I judge all other pickles against, even my own. 

I hadn’t canned anything in years but my first summer at Bob’s homestead, he had a large cucumber, green tomato, and pepper crop at the end of August. I put on an apron, dug out Ball’s Blue Book from his cookbook shelf, channelled my Nana and went to work. We just finished the last jar of those 2017 pickles, the one with the hot peppers. Good thing we’re making more. This year there will be a whole batch of hot pickles!

(Bob Hartman-Berrier photos, above, the flower garden at The Farm, and the breathtaking view of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; below – Looking up the hill)

We had planned on a big garden this year but of course, plans changed, we just got here, and it’s too late for a garden. We looked around to see what was available for produce. Russ Daigle’s produce at The Farm in Terre Noire is all organic. Even in a lean year, this is a very impressive garden, especially as it’s perched on a rather inhospitable slope south of Chéticamp right on the coast. The wind she blow, you know? If we’d arrived just a day earlier, the ferocious winds wouldn’t have allowed us to stand up straight on his hill. If you know the island, you know I’m not exaggerating. Russ’s corn hadn’t quite broken but it was growing sideways.

Russ saves his seed for The Farm and doesn’t use starter plants, even for herbs or flowers. Given our six-month residency here for now, starting plants indoors won’t work for us but I can ask and maybe he’ll sell us a few plants next year when we arrive. With his land sloping uphill from the ocean, I also wonder if he’s figured out which cultivars will grow best under a strong west wind!

Bob and I spent an hour or so washing, slicing and brining the veg, listening to my buddies from Barachois sing and play Acadian music – in honor of Nana, of course! This year’s pickles have cukes (seeded – look at the size of those puppies!), onions, green tomatoes, yellow zucchini, and red pepper for color. You understand that cooks always use what’s at hand. The pickles have brined for about two hours so it’s time to drain and rinse them a few times. 

Bread and Butter Pickles 2020

A batch = six-seven pounds of processed veg – sliced, mixed, salted, brined, rinsed, rinsed again, and drained.  There was almost a gallon of brine left from a double batch. Weigh the processed veg and set aside in a bowl. It’s easier than you think and Bob showed me how. Weigh yourself and a large-enough container, then add the veg and weigh again until the difference is six-seven pounds. 

In a separate large pot – bigger than you think you might need, bring 3 cups of sugar and 4.5 cups of white vinegar to a rolling boil, adding 3-4 tablespoons of pickling spice (I always add extra mustard seed and this year, a teaspoon of red pepper flakes for zing) stirring until the sugar is dissolved and the solution bubbles up.

Add the veg you rinsed, drained and weighed, and mix well, getting the spices into every corner. If, at this point, the liquid doesn’t cover the veg, add more sugar and vinegar until it does. I had to do this so I increased the amount of vinegar in my recipe, adding a proportional amount of sugar, but not more spices. My proportions were 1 cup of vinegar to ⅔ cup of sugar. Cover, bringing it back to a rolling boil (this is why you use a larger pot – it won’t boil over) for long enough to make the pickles translucent but not have them fall apart. Mine took about 15 minutes. That was a lot of veg, around 15 pounds, cooked in two batches and canned in three.

Pack the hot pickles in sterilized jars. Make sure the liquid comes to 1/2 inch from the top and push any stray veg back down. Shake the jar gently to remove air bubbles, wipe the rim clean with a damp paper towel, cap the jar and process for 10 minutes in boiling water. Here’s what today’s sweet and hot bread and butter pickles look like – 18 pints, 2 half pints and one quart!

We still have enough cukes for another big batch of just cucumber pickle and enough beets for who knows how many batches of pickled beets. Russ (Bob photo) wanted to give us the food and Bob wisely wouldn’t let him. We want to come back and savor his bounty at The Farm again next year. He’s 76 and when people ask him how he can do this at his age, he replies “because I do this at this age,” a slogan for all of us, right?

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved.

You’d think, being a musician, I’d be stalked by songbirds tweeting pretty melodies. Instead, ravens, with their fringed, feathery, Roman noses and decidedly un-musical voices, are my daily companions here on the island. There’s a pair loitering on the homestead that are either siblings from this year’s hatching or a mated pair. I see them foraging every day. They fly by with the egg shells we’ve put out in the woods and fight over them. Canny, they resist most efforts to photograph them (I snuck this one of the pair on the wire) but their presence is constant. This is their territory, the nearest open patch of land for foraging.

Alone, you might mistake one for a crow, whose Latin name is corvus brachyrhynchos or “raven with a small nose,” but ravens are heftier and taller as well. Size difference notwithstanding, ravens do have a relationship with the crows and I’m pretty sure they communicate with each other. I see both mobbing hawks here. Fearless, ravens are even described by Roger Burrows in Birds of Atlantic Canada as “a crow that’s convinced itself it’s a raptor.” Like all corvids, ravens are very curious, always looking for food, with calls that are anything but musical. “KEE-ROOOONK” they croak, banging things on the roof, which we are grateful is not made of metal. Imagine the racket. 

For centuries, Native peoples have revered and respected ravens as the bringer of light and as the companion taking souls to their final rest. It’s in the latter capacity that I’m most familiar with the mythic raven. In March 2008, I was touring in Arizona and New Mexico and on an off day, we visited the Grand Canyon (photo left). I thought I’d stepped into a painting and the majesty, the beauty of the landscape was a balm to my heart. In Florida, my father was on his deathbed in hospice and he and I had said a tearful goodbye on the phone. It was a somber day and the band was thoughtful of my feelings. We all noted the omnipresence of the ravens. They ride the thermals at the clifftop so of course, we saw them constantly. The park even sold a tee-shirt with their image on it. 

Buffeted by wind, we explored the south rim and enjoyed the rare March sunshine. Around four, we got off one of the jitneys used to ferry visitors around the park. As we stood there, a raven landed right in our circle, looked around until it met my eyes, and settled. The bird’s mouth opened and closed while it uttered clucking noises and whuffled it’s throat feathers in and out. Gobsmacked, we were rooted to the spot. I swung the camera on my wrist up and took this photo, then the bird flew off. Five minutes later, in the parking lot, my cell phone rang. My brother was on the line. Dad had died at about the same time the raven had more or less talked to me. We finished the last day of the tour and then I flew to Florida for Dad’s memorial service. 

Back in Massachusetts later that month, band member Max Cohen and I were recording and editing some music. I thought there was outside noise rattling through my head but it turned out to be a tune, a new one. I picked up the fiddle and started playing the first half. Max walked in with his guitar and played the B part. Together, we had just written “The Raven’s Wing,” a tribute to my Dad. 

We made a quick demo and I sent the file to my mother and told her the name. “Raven’s Wing,” she mused. “Did you know that was the name of your father’s unit in WWII?” Dad had flown with the Army Air Corps in Italy. Mom continued, “Their newsletter is called ‘The Raven’ and their insignia is three silver ravens on a blue background.” Gobsmacked yet again, I wondered – did my father send a messenger or was that him? Fanciful, perhaps, but it had been, overall, a strange experience, one that led to fancies.

Factor in that I had a pretty volatile relationship with my father. We didn’t get along. I think he was scared that I would go astray, that I was so headstrong I couldn’t be controlled. He was right about that and though he tried, he failed to control me and in the process, we lost our connection to each other.

Still, I am so much like him, hiding my tenderness under a gruff exterior, unable to keep my mouth shut when I know I should. I am my father’s daughter in character and in looks. His stamp is on my face and my daughter’s and he looked like his Hébert ancestors. Those forebears were hard-working Acadian farmers, stubborn-as-hell men and women who never learned to keep their mouth shut, either. That’s who we are.

It was only after my father’s death that I came to know him better through my sister and that is comforting. Today, August 31, 2020, would have been his 96th birthday. It’s my fancy but perhaps the ravens here came to say he was doing just fine with his old friends, soaring the thermals at the cliff edge. 

Raven’s Wing – with Max Cohen, Fiddlers Summit 2010, Shepherdstown WV

Raven’s Wing – with fiddlers Bruce Molsky, Robin Bouliane, Pierre Schryer, and guitarist Quinn Bachand at the 2014 La Grande Rencontre in Montreal. This was the first time any of them except Bruce and I had heard the tune but they immediately found the heart of the music and let it soar.

© 2020 Donna Hébert, all rights reserved

Big fields of beautiful flowers have always fascinated me. The riotous profusion of color makes my heart beat faster. I recall standing thunderstruck on Whidbey Island in San Juan Sound in Washington state, looking at a 20 acre field of wild foxglove in every shade of pink and purple. If I’d been Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” I’d have taken a nap in the poppies and never woken up!

My childhood years were a challenge and I soothed myself in the sanctuary of nearby woods and hedgerows, filled in spring with the blue of violet and the white and green of lily of the valley. I counted the seasons in those woods and when we moved, I went alone to bid them farewell. The abundance of those flowers became part of my inner landscape. When I saw photos of the lavender fields of Provence, I wanted to roll in them like catnip.

Oddly, sunflowers didn’t used to be my favorite flower. I judged them by a rose’s beauty and fragrance, forgetting the rose’s thorns. Sunflowers are tall and spindly, oversized, scraggly-looking standing there by themselves, one or two specimens in a home garden. I think I started noticing and admiring them when a neighbor planted a half acre plot near my old Amherst house. Every year, I looked forward to seeing them push up through what had been lowland and wave their heads at the sky. It was a big stand of just sunflowers and it dawned on me that that’s how they are meant to grow, holding each other up to reach the sun. After that, they became my favorite.

In the Margaree River valley, I found an even bigger field of glorious sunflowers owned by Miller Farms in northeast Margaree. I pulled my camera out. It was the end of my first summer on the island and the field was an enormous bouquet wishing me well until I could return. When we married, our friend’s house was filled with sunflowers and asters. Every year I take photos of that Margaree field to be reminded of the beauty.

Sunflowers (helianthus annuus) are heliotropic plants, with flowers turning to follow the sun. Native to the Americas, that head-turning characteristic is found wherever they grow. Their symbolism goes back a long ways. In old Tarot decks, sunflowers signify success and growth and you’ll find them on the cards most associated with a successful harvest.

Today, I look at Miller’s field of sunflowers and their collective sunny optimism inspires me. For half a century, I’ve been trying to lift myself above the labels of my childhood, to bring my heart to the fore, to learn to be happy. I can’t do it alone. I’ve needed many villages of people and a lot of music and I’m still working on it. 

The sunflowers remind me that we depend on each other, that we are stronger together, and that together we can hold each other up, turning toward the light.