I spent today visiting with my Uncle Gerry, Aunt Sharon and their daughter Hailey at an old school house they converted into a sort of summer home. It was a pleasant way to spend a day, filled with the food and conversation I’ve come to expect from my family.
I see Hailey quite infrequently, so each time I do see her I marvel at the mental development she has undergone. She’s not yet four years old, so she’s in one of the more amusing and trying stages of childhood. Every innocent and purely silly expression she provided was smile-inducing. With the actions of each relative present today as proof, I’m convinced there’s nothing that can provide a youthful spirit in aged folks more easily than a child.
After dinner my parents and I took a short drive to the shore of the Bay of Fundy (home to the highest tides in all the world). We walked along the stone carpeted beach for a while and then moved to a section of land beyond the beach where Acadians had built dykes. The dykes are still quite noticable today as mound-lines. On one section of retrieved land the rough wooden poles used to create the dykes over 300 years ago were exposed to the air, looking like the spine of some great serpent.
The Acadians were French settlers who built the dykes along the shore to keep the tide waters from soaking land. Their efforts provided them with quality farm land and allowed them to thrive here peacefully, with help from the Mi’kmaq first nations people, until they were forcibly expelled from Nova Scotia by the Brittish in 1755. This is one of the darker chapters of our history, marking a terrible act of ethnic cleansing. Some Acadians eventually became part of the culture group called Cajuns and were sent as far away as Georgia.
It’s so humbling to stand on land that 300 years ago was farmed and lived on by the first European settlers of this nation, and that was home to facinating native cultures for centuries, if not millennia, before that. We owe a debt of history to so many before us to made our own lives possible, and it’s truly a shame how little most of us know of the histories of our local area, not to mention that of the world. Reminders such as this walk along the shore are what keep me searching for new knowledge and understanding of the world.