Square dancing

My family farm was in Emily Township, just west of Peterborough, Ontario, and in the 60’s, family farming was still a way of life in the area. Life on the farm was broken up by Sundays and summers spent at my grandparents’ cottage on Chemong Lake, along with my mother’s close-knit Scottish-descent clan. And then of course, there were the frequent trips to the city (Peterborough) for my dance classes. I was a rarity among my farming friends, who mostly played hockey and baseball if they did anything at all beyond school and chores, but my parents supported my love of ballet and jazz.

Harrison family, Christmas 2012

Only a handful of people in the Harrison clan (pictured right) still farm today. My father’s brother, his two sons, and his grandson still make their living from the dairy farm, but my cousins’ wives have always worked in the city. One cousin on my mother’s side still operates a horse ranch on his father’s land, but otherwise, we have all left the land.

But I don’t think the land has ever left me. I may have spent 25 years living in downtown Toronto and Montreal, but my deep culture is anchored in a farming community that only exists for a handful of people here anymore. Landing in Toronto at 18, I might as well have immigrated from England or Italy, my life experience was so different from the urban-born kids. Toronto was a shock, and as much as I was excited by the place, I was very lonely for family. My parents had entered into a difficult, painful divorce when I was 16, and family did not really exist for me anymore, not like it had before anyway, so there wasn’t a solid, safe place to return to. I reacted by joining a Pentecostal church in Toronto and finding my extended family there while I studied at Ryerson.

That church continued to be my family for the next 5 years as I finished the growing up I needed to do. It was an entirely white, middle class community with a large student population, and it provided a larger, urban version of the little United Church I grew up in – a tightknit Christian community where everyone knew you and shared the same values. An enclave of sameness in a world of difference. Now I am thinking that I might have needed that security in order to cope with the transition and the intense diversity that surrounded me. I was always very open to others. I can’t remember a time when I was not enthralled by difference, even as a 16 year old longing to live in the big city. But I have wondered if the reason I have lived my life as such a cultural wander (because I have lived deep inside other cultures) was because I’d lost my sense of my own ethnicity. After all, white Canadian culture was a pretty vague thing to me then.

My Christian experience is also how I was first introduced to ideas about social justice, well before I went to university and learned anything about critical theory. I worked in a downtown Toronto mission for 3 summers while I went to college, and our director taught us about liberation theology and community development. I continued to work in the community development field for the next 25 years.

My Celtic dance in
"Beauty of a Woman"

I have recognized other transplanted rural folks along the way though. I remember when I was about 40 and working at the Montreal YWCA, and we had a staff party with live music by some French Canadian fiddlers. Of course I jumped up and danced - anyone who attends music events in Peterborough knows they will usually find me on the dance floor! I grew up square dancing under my mother’s skirts (literally) at the local barn dance at Fowler’s Corners and that music still evokes an incredible sense of well-being and happiness in me. That day in Quebec, a coworker that I had always been fond of picked up a couple of spoons and started playing her heart out with the musicians. Geneviève came to life with those spoons just like I did when I danced. Later we talked and I found out she was from the regions of Quebec, I forget where now. Like me, she was an urban professional living and working in the heart of Montreal, but her cultural heart was somewhere else. 

Genevieve and I, it’s not that we were embarrassed to say where we came from, but we were just busy melding into the urban professional scene, which certainly is a culture of it’s own. I never remember being encouraged to have my own ethnic identity, living in Toronto or Montreal. That seemed to be taboo for whites. Losing that part of myself was part of the price of fitting in. I can’t defend that statement. I just know that’s the way it felt.

Now when I go to local events like the Peterborough One World Dinner, a community event that always finishes with English country-dancing to a caller and fiddlers, and all the people are dancing in circles and sets, from preschoolers to retirees, I often feel a lot emotion well up inside me. Am I overwhelmed with happiness in community because I am lonely? Is it because I am still mourning my parent’s divorce that took this way of life away from me? Or is it because I see some glimmer of that culture that still pulsates in these younger white bodies as they hop and clap and laugh together with the caller? I don’t know, but it is very moving for me, especially watching my own daughters skip and swing. It is a beautiful culture. I feel sad I gave it up for so long.