We are told that marriage and friendship both take a lot of work. The same holds true for neighbouring in farm country.
In the 1970s in my home township in southern Ontario, a well-educated and highly qualified woman from the city presented herself as a candidate for township council. This wasn’t a hopeless cause. We had elected women to council before and the people had already smashed through the glass ceiling just three years earlier by voting a city person, my Uncle Fred, to the post of Deputy-Reeve. That was like getting Barack Obama into the White House. So we didn’t think accepting a woman from the city represented that much of a leap for the residents of Mono Township.
However, at the all-candidates meeting, she stood up and referred to our beloved homeland as “Maw-No Township.” This produced a sharp intake of breath and murmurs throughout the room for, of course, the correct local pronunciation of the name was “Moan-Uh.” She did it several more times and then trampled on a number of landforms in the neighbourhood. She said “Hockley Valley” instead of “Huckly” and called our largest river the “Nottawa-say-ga” instead of Nottawa-saw-ga.” The audience heard nothing else the poor woman had to say that night about taxation or good roads and her candidacy quietly expired in the womb. On Election Day she polled less than 50 votes.
I was the editor of the local newspaper at the time and she later expressed her frustration to me that she had been rejected because she was a foreigner. I suggested to her that the real problem lay elsewhere. Mispronouncing key place names implied that she was unfamiliar with the township. The residents would have made allowance for her if English had been her second language. But she spoke English perfectly and still managed to mangle all the familiar names. She left the office in a huff and never spoke to me again.
I sympathized with her because I was a blow-in to the township myself. My mother had moved us out of the city to a pasture farm on the 7th Line when I was five years old and right from the moment I showed up at the two-room SS #17 public school the other kids made it very clear who I was and where I came from. I was a city slicker. But my mother worked hard to make us fit in. She drove all the kids on our line to school in her panel truck. She played the organ in the local church and joined the Women’s Institute. She gave drama lessons and put on plays in the Orange Hall. And whenever she was away doing her book tours and radio shows she would farm us out to various families in the neighbourhood. By the time I was 16 it never occurred to me that I was a local. But it also never occurred to me that I didn’t belong there or wasn’t welcome. I was just different.
When I bought this little farm 30 miles north of Mono Township it was exactly the same thing. My property was known as the Old Currie Place. The last Currie to own this property died in 1965 and I have now been here for 40 years, but to this day it remains the Old Currie Place to my neighbours. Apparently, you have to die in bed in the farmhouse before they will ever come around to calling it the Old Needles Place. So these are words I will never get to hear.
I remember asking the hydro office to come out and connect me to the grid. The inspector didn’t even get out of his truck. He identified me instantly as a city person and a weekender.
“Call us if you’re still here next spring,” he said. He wasn’t unfriendly. He was just tired of going to the trouble of getting people hooked up and then disconnecting them after they’d spent one winter in these hills.
What appears to be standoffishness in an old resident is often just a mental calculation in progress, much like the one made by that hydro man. Neighbouring is a lot of work. It takes time and patience. We’re prepared to make the effort, but we need some reassurance that it won’t be wasted on a blow-in that blows out.
- Dan Needles