Essays on Canadian village life compelling

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This article was published 04/11/2023 (695 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dan Needles, author of Finding Larkspur: A Return to Village Life, tells us that “in the past few years people have been quietly fleeing the city in droves.”

In this slim collection of funny and wise essays, originating in part from magazine columns written over the years, Needles takes readers through the Canadian village of today, making note of “customs and traditions that endure despite the best efforts of Twitter, Facebook and Amazon.”

But of course the influx of city people to the country is also leaving its mark, creating what Needles calls a “clash of cultures” that is dramatic.

Needles lives on a small farm near Collingwood in southern Ontario and has worked as a journalist, speechwriter and an insurance executive until the success of his Wingfield Farm stage plays allowed him to make a living as a writer from his farm.

He won the 2003 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for With Axe and Flask and his stage plays have been produced in theatres across Canada and in the U.S. He was also named a Member of the Order of Canada for his writings about rural Canadians.

Accompanied by charming illustrations by Wesley Bates, Needles’ book takes us on a tour of the rural village, its history, his own history, the modern changes that have come about with the influx of young city people and other assorted and interesting subjects.

Many of these short essays are funny. Take Life in the Fishbowl, which reminds us that it’s always important to wave in the country and to be careful what you say, because many folks are related and word gets around. Needles adds that in a small town, “you are under surveillance by operatives far more efficient than the CIA…” and the “solution of course is to live a blameless life… or develop a thicker skin.”

Equally humourous are pieces such as Naming the Farm, On Exercise, In Praise of the Farm Dog and many others. Needles dedicates his book to his beloved family dog, Dexter. What more can one say?

One essay reveals that Needles descends from, or is related to, a long line of theatre people and to the Massey family — including Walter Massey of Massey-Harris farm machinery and Vincent Massey, the first Canadian-born governor general — but inherited little from his illustrious ancestors. Interestingly, in another piece he tells us that, on his wife’s side, he is related to Agnes McPhail, Canada’s first woman member of parliament.

On the Rural School tells us of the decline of the rural school and the frequent closures. “In spite of a period of rapid growth, every hundred new houses built produces only five children for the school system,” Needles says.

An essay on the supposed “end of the world” and the death of newspapers serve up uplifting antidotes to gloom-and-doom thinking on the death of family farms and local papers. But on the latter front, Needles goes on to say later in the book that farmers now make up only one per cent of the population.

The essays flip back and forth in time, which can be confusing. However, most of the light-hearted pieces are short and easy to read, and the folksy illustrations by Bates make the collection even easier to breeze through.

Overall Finding Larkspur is full of witty observations on village life, humorous and delightful.

Cheryl Girard is a writer who grew up in a small town and whose father-in-law once owned a small farm and tractor dealership.