(Pamela thank you for allowing me to share this)
"It is interesting to me, how the Arcadian heritage winds its way down the years, despite distance and discard.
At my brother Tod's wedding, he asked me if I knew the words to "Ave Marie Stella" and would I sing it at the ceremony. I did of course.
Folks were surprised that I knew a song like that and wondered what it meant and where it had came from, for his wedding was not in a Catholic church and it was far away from Canada (in Tod's backyard of his home in Crestview, FL).
Tod himself was touched, as it brought his Mom, who had long since passed away, to the wedding ceremony, in a way...he said to me, "You sang it just like she always used to.""
--- It goes back to M. Burke's emotions that I wrote about on page one. Hundreds of years after one's ancestors leave a place, they still suffer from the loss.
Acadians left their homeland not willingly, but at the point of a musket (or many muskets).
They live for all time with a sense of lost connection and a yearning.
That's one reason I am writing Tintamarre, to allow people from now to understand or perhaps learn a little, about the people before them