A few weeks back, the missus and I made a short trip from Dresden to Thamesville, passed over the Thames and made a sharp right turn. Had we headed left, Moraviantown and a cost-saving gasoline fill-up was just a few miles away but our objective was to pick up apple juice and honey from stops nearby.
Rather than heading back the way we came, we continued westward toward Kent Bridge, navigating the twists and turns of our route and taking note of a sign advertising one of the more minor crops grown in Chatham-Kent, walnuts, or as the woman of the house informed us, “English walnuts.”
These were contained in 20-pound sacks hung inside the drive shed along one wall. Looking about, I inquired if a group of little, 12-foot trees bore the crop but was informed that, “No, those are peach trees” – much to my chagrin. The walnuts were taken from a pair of largish trees and I was informed that, with all the rain, there was an especially strong yield.
We brought a sack home, enjoyed some of the most flavourful walnuts either of us had ever consumed and decided to replace, the following day, walnuts for almonds, in the fruit cake we make every year for Christmas.
The “wedding cake” recipe was handed down from my grandmother and, presumably, was used for her special day more than a century ago. Eva was born to Moses Miller in 1885, one of several sisters raised within the upper reaches of the Thames. Pennsylvanian Dutch (or Deutsch) in origin, she married Valentine Carter, grandson to William Carter, who also immigrated from the United States to what is now Ontario not long after the turn of the 18th century.
According to family lore, “… as a little boy, William Carter was stolen by Indians and brought up among them. The Indian Chief promised him that at the age of 21, he could have any 100 acres he wished, he travelled to Oxford from Pennsylvania, by covered wagon…”
I’ve driven past the property many times. Through its southeast corner, a little rivulet passes. From there it flows south and westward to Woodstock, Ingersoll and London, eventually passing by the farm downstream of Moraviantown where we purchased our walnuts.
Of William Carter’s story, I suspect there are elements of truth attached, though grants of land made by the Indigenous peoples at that time were generally not recognized. The government-approved purchase was made in 1828.
My father, William’s great grandson, was tall, athletic, dark-haired and inherited the slightly bow-legged stance of his mother. The youngest of seven, he took over Valentine’s 100-square-acres, located just a few miles from the original Carter homestead, not far from the Phelan Creek, a small tributary to the Thames.
An archeological dig conducted many years ago determined that the property was, in the distant past, the location of an Indigenous summer camp. The little creek would have once provided fish and a forest pool – long since drained – would no doubt have been attractive to a wide assortment of game.
One could still, in the 1960s, find arrowheads when plowing the fields next to the woodlot and at the heart of the place, the central point of the 100 acres, a quartz-infused boulder lay. Each year it would trip the plow attached to our International tractor and if the little Ford was being employed, stall forward motion entirely.
It is where, as a young lad, walking the field in early spring, I heard my name whispered, carried it seemed by the breeze, gently passing along the undulating landscape. And then, a second time.
I would return to the spot, hoping to hear the voice once more, but never again, never again.
Not all that long ago, I recalled the experience to a member of Ontario’s Indigenous community, a person who had been “scooped” from her family in the 1960s but since reunited. She told me three things.
“You’re freaking me out,” was one.
The second concerned the qualities of quartz, such as the belief it can amplify energy and facilitate clarity of thought.
The third was a confirmation. Yes, she said, you are a person of place.
My father was as well, his forebears having lived for multiple generations on this land. My mother’s lineage, in contrast, is Scottish in a general sense. Her mother’s people hailed from the borderlands, arriving in the latter half of the 19th century and her father’s people from an isolated island where the family members scratched out a living not far from a quarry where some of their number learned the necessary skills of stone masonry, a knowledge employed in the new land.
Place, however, is not so much about some geographical point on a map as a sense of belonging, contrary to the dominant narrative that divides, characterizing some as indigenous, others as immigrants (temporary or permanent), others still as settlers-colonials or, as put to me once, people who “crawled out of some hole in Europe” (and should return there). 
I for one, am of place. Best to recognize and accept the past and move forward. As my father once intoned, “all people are the same,” and if I might add to those words, only the circumstance differs.  ◊