Page 17 - Anne Morrell, Margaree Valley "Seasons of My Life"

ISSUE : Issue 45

Published by Ronald Caplan on 1987/6/1

Anne Morrell, Margaree Valley "Seasons of My Life" (Where were you born?) Trenton, New Jersey, 1948. But I was raised in Pennsylvania, be? cause Trenton was just half a mile across the river. That's where the hospital was. (What kind of situation were you raised in?) Typical lower middle class. Working parents--my father worked in a bank, and my mother was a housewife who became a sec? retary to put us through school. Actually, she was a secretary before she was a house? wife. She went to business college. (You didn't grow up on a farm?) No, but my grandparents had a farm. My mother was the farm girl that married the city boy. So we spent a lot of time on the grandparents' farm. They had about a hundred head of Hol- stein cows. (So this is not a big change.) Not really. Because I used to love going out to the farm. And then when I became a teenager, I got into horses and I worked on farms. Rode, showed, fox-hunted, taught kids how to ride. I had half a horse for a- while. My parents couldn't afford the board for a horse. And my grandparents wouldn't let me keep it on their farm be? cause of (dairy) regulations. So I split it with a friend. The two of us bought a cheap horse and trained it, and split the board. And then I worked at the stable to help earn money to pay for it, When I first came (to Cape Breton), that's what I did. I bought a couple of horses locally--young racehorses--and retrained them for riding horses and jumpers. Showed them in Sydney, in the Exhibition. And then I bred quarter horses for awhile, showed them in Sydney and Antigonish; took one down to Truro once. And I taught all the kids around here how to ride, had a 4-H club. But they all grew up and went a- way to school and got married, and that was the end of it! (You and Garry, when did you meet each oth? er?) High school. We went to high school together. We were always friends, because my brother and Garry were close friends. They had the same interests: motorcycles, old cars, stuff like that. We came up here to visit my brother, and really liked it. , I wanted to have my own farm. I was work? ing for a guy in the States, and it was a great job, I got a regular salary, but I wasn't getting anywhere. I just felt like, if I had my own place and I was doing it, then at least I'd have something in the end. (Garry) had just finished graduate school, just gotten a Master's degree in Fine Arts. And he wanted to get away from the craziness of the States and just have a place to be able to do what he wanted. Which was playing with machines, and doing a little bit of art, and farming. It was the "self-sufficient homestead" days. The first day we came, I came with Garry and his sister. We drove up in a VW bus. And I had a photograph of the house where (my, brother) lived- So we come, to , t;his stretch ( Northeast Mar? garee." "It's got 'o Do around here some? where," We're driving around in circles, through the loop around the river. Finally, this guy comes down the road riding a lit? tle kid's bicycle. And he comes up to us, and he says, "Oh, I saw the Pennsylvania license plates. You must be Allan's sister. Well, he lives right here, and his truck broke down in Inverness, so he'll be a- while. But go in and make yourself at home." And of course that just blew me a- way. I said, "How's this guy know all this stuff?" Of course, that's how it's been in Margaree ever since. The first trip down was just to visit. It was lucky that I could take about 7 weeks off from work. We visited my brother, and went to Newfoundland, drove around there for a few weeks, Put a garden in here and started looking for land. Then we came back in the winter, on Boxing Day, and spent another 3 weeks. Kind of did the same thing, got the feel of the place, and kept an eye out for some land. And my brother found a piece for us, which the 3 of us bought together. And we immigrated that following summer, as soon as Garry got out of graduate school. When we came up here, we had about $1200 and a truckload of stuff, that's all we CONTINUED NEXT PAGE (17)

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