So I'm chatting with Julia Child at the library about the cooking thing and the tv personality thing and as we talk I understand that these are fairly superficial expressions of the fundemental mathematical basis of things. It reassures me to know that she is deeply mathematical. Later I'm riding my bicycle through a room with a lot of furniture, making a lot of slow careful turns, and I understand that this is teaching me something important.
	August has been a whirlwhind, starting off with Saltwater Festival in Brunswick where, sitting about 50 feet from the stage, we saw Dar Williams, Catie Curtis, Slaid Cleaves, and more. Folk music is like birding, and I was able to check 3 or 4 important sightings off my lifetime list. A few days later, Colleen and David, Claudia and Mike came to Unity and we caravaned by way of the Cat to Nova Scotia for the Congres Mondial Acadien, the Acadian Reunion. We spent a day at the Bourg/Bourque reunion in Tusket, staying in Yarmouth, then up to Annapolis-Royal where we walked on the first levees, the dykes that Acadian farmers made to reclaim salt marsh into farmland. We learned about the aboiteaux, the system of wooden culverts with foot valves, that let rain water flush the salt out of the land over a period of 2 or 3 years. This kind of engineering required that they work communally. This reunion thing involved about 250,000 people over a period of two weeks and over the whole of Nova Scotia. My sisters stayed longer; we were there for 4 days. The Acadian flag was everywhere; we bought it as pins, flags, stained glass, and fridge magnets. Little deportation crosses were also big sellers. Most people wore some kind of family name tag all the time, and so wherever you went, you found yourself exchanging information about where you are from and what little genealogy you knew. At the Blanchard reunion Mike ran into my first cousin Billy Hebert who happened to be staying in the next room at the same motel as us, but we didn't know that until we met up with my folks again at Grand Pré.
The day we spent at Grand Pré happened to be programmed as "Cajuns Come Home to Grand Pré" day. A lot of people from Louisiana mingled about and a Cajun chef made excellent gumbo and jambalaya. In the church I met reporter Ron Thibodeau who wrote about the event for the Times-Picayune. I related to him the etymology of the PicayUnity. In the church there are a series of shiny brass plaques listing the names of the Acadian settlers at the time of the deportation, and we were surprised to see Melissa's last name (Bastien) there on the same plaque as mine. Our ancestors went separate ways apparently, as there are no Bastiens in Louisiana. Her father was born in Quebec. I took a picture of our reflection on the plaque to commemorate the moment. That evening we all had dinner at an excellent restaurant in Wolfville called Tempest. Lots of good Acadian music collected by everyone. The Evangeline song that I learned from the nuns many years ago (by A.T. Bourque) is a personal favorite, and I like the other Evangeline song (by Michel Conte) also. I liked the Celtic-French band called Grand Derangement, and contacted their agent to book them in Unity in the spring. Also, Les Muses. Since I feel about genealogy the way Zora Neale Hurston felt about black history, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the history of our people and the Acadian identity thing. I'm thinking next year, we'll all get Acadian flag tatoos and march in and reclaim the ancestral lands. As Claudia and Mike were leaving, Cheryl and toddler Nola arrived for a few days and we got to read a lot of books aloud, classics like Giggle, Giggle, Quack and Walter, the Farting Dog, and we discovered new and entertaining uses for the exercise ball. As Cheryl was heading out, the Szeligas from Rhode Island came in to bring Meredith back to UMaine where she is a pre-vet student. Our dogs and cats think she is the best house sitter ever. Amongst all this social activity, Melissa started her new job as a Headstart teacher, and we have been hustling to get 93 Main finished for tenants to move in September 1.

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