The great Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers – taken from us far too soon at a mere 33 – has inspired me in many ways. I first encountered him through his modern (and very Canadian) sea chantey “Barrett’s Privateers“, a staple of folk singers at pub nights for drunken Canadian undergraduates like myself (and which has more American admirers than you’d think). The joy of singing along to that song was part of what led me to join McGill’s Folk Music Society club, and eventually become its president for a year. It wasn’t long after that that I had my life-changing Buddhist epiphany in Thailand – yet even there, Rogers’s “Mary Ellen Carter” played a major role. His “The Idiot” was a great comfort at the times I expected a tenure-track job would leave me in a long-distance relationship from the woman I loved on the East Coast. When I married her, “Forty-Five Years” was the last dance at our wedding.

Lately, though, there’s a much lesser known song of his that has been going through my mind repeatedly. It is the closing song of From Fresh Water, his posthumous 1984 album about Ontario – where, despite his well known ties to the Maritime provinces, Rogers (like me) was born and raised. This song is called “The House of Orange”.