Song for Elly

Spring wardrobe, scant on the forest ridge; scrublands of dogwood, chokecherry ragged. There’s a breeze. Sou’wester off the lake: seagulls inland. A plover takes to her trickster habit; feigning hurt to attract me away from her nest. Now the park, playground quiet; voice of the wind guides the swings in the breeze; in the silence of children’s laughter.

Over there, beyond the crack on the ridge, vineyard dug into the hill waits; Spanish chatter of morning workers soon; Songbirds and geese; a crow, then of pigeons. Over there, promise of heavy weather, yet to the east, brighter than ever.

Maybe that’s how it goes? The song I mean; I say to no one. Zip my leather jacket against the hangover of winter in the air. Ya, song for Elly: See if I can hear it; the sages said I would; offered me up a seat on a crowded and empty park bench; pew in the cathedral of morning. And then the scent of it arrives. Accordion: She plays it in E: 26 treble buttons; more buttons for bass; large medley skirting narrow rows of wine patch, waffling in sweet-water air.

Elly Kelly: Born in a scrabble-dirt four corners in the middle of New Brunswick. A school, then a store, two grottos, a heavy spire of church and a stop sign are just about all that held the place together. Oh ya, that and 30 miles of sandy dirt; potato country dirt. Yet in the leanness, Elly’s mom and dad and brothers and sisters could fly in the face of it; raise their fiddles and spoons and harmonicas and banjos and of course, Elly and her accordion; man could they play; play until they rattled the pots right off the stove. And that was on any given plain ol’ morning. Mornings just like this one; empty playground park mornings. Show all of us how everyday folks could wing music right off of worn-plank floor to soar in the joy often hidden; seeded in everyday places; everyday things; everyday people. Ya see, Rosaireville, New Brunswick, just like many other places like it, gave rise to players like Johnny Burke, John Acoin, the Good Brothers, Rita McNeil and John Allen Cameron; often Nashville careers. Ya see places like Rosaireville were put up to show that hard-bitten life was also designed to grow.

Elly carried that knowing smile of music with her through a life as a mom, a sister, a wife and a lover. She was a performer. Didn’t need the big circuits, downhome one’s just fine; roots music among her kind. She could get up there on stage and sit; spindle-back chair bold in the colours of the Acadian flag. Her wide-brim hat and frills upon her jacket. Her boots stomping on the rattle board, shining face with a percussion section in a sometimes one-woman band; more often with Brian and son Terry. Music driven, that is, by the stuff that rattled pots and pans right off the stove; and that was before breakfast; that kinda music, ya understan’.

Everyday people shipped off the streets of Marseille, Dijon, from Paris back alleyways, discarded into gutter boats then swept away to the new world— planted-blood in French Acadie. Now Acadians; dared to befriend native custodians of the land when land was destined by God and Crown to be grabbed and fenced by ‘discoverers’. Acadians; honoured neither French nor British flags in their newly adopted home; Paid dearly for the choice to say no: Became survivors once again; boat people along a newworld coastline, separated from brothers and sisters and children and parents and such. Cast away from the thick black soil of their bog farms along Nova Scotia shorelines; cast away by steeped-oldworld- suspicions. Suspicions of Acadian loyalties to Mig’ma friends and allies: Never; the ‘discoverers’ barked. Acadians; sent away once more.

Time past: And when they began to drift back from the Carolinas; back from Louisiana; back from the Mississippi delta they remembered bonds made with other refugees; the Florida Indians; and the soulful off the plantations run by ‘discoverers’. Indians and also slave blood stolen from Africa with whom the Cajuns made music; traded songs and ways and means of playing. You know, about seeds hidden in everyday-things-kinda playing?

Acadian-Cajuns; some stayed south; others back north after pardon for transgressions. Now raised a flag of their own on discarded hard rock and scrabble lands of maritime shores; they turned to the sea. Mariners now who embraced the metaphor of the barachois— you know the pockets, small basins of seawater that hang onto beaches through the passage of the tides. Barachois: calm and still on the surface; teaming with zest underneath; lookout-unstoppable-kinda-zest. Zest that made up Elly’s blood don’t you know. The kind of zest that flies in the face of put-down and sour winds and loss of loved ones; Just like that.

So, on a morning on a park bench soothed by cold winds and seabirds I shout ‘ouch’ for all who knew her. Ouch ouch ouch. Elly is gone; Left us Sunday morning. Early. Forever not gone; her music will sing to remind us that ouch softens with time. That music is braided with joy and sorrow; with give and receive; And in the notes of Elly’s Song played in E; come the voices of struggle, of victory; voices of Dijon and Jamaica and Sierra Leone. Voices of Elly and Campbellford—mostly voices from beyond.