“The province is shaped like a giant lobster. Less than four hundred miles long, with a maximum width of 100 miles, it has some 5,000 miles of coastline … and at no place in the province is it possible to be more than 50 miles from ocean water … [T]he sea is a common language, a birthright and a backyard full of sapphires.”

This fine paragraph is taken from Charles Gaines’s “A Family Place” (1994), a memoir of the life-affirming change that he, his wife Patricia and their three children made in moving from rural New Hampshire to the Tracadie Harbour (read Eastern) region of Nova Scotia, near the university town of Antigonish.

I quote him here because he writes so evocatively about the province and because he is a writer we, as readers, should know more about.

Though he died this year, his book lives on; 30 years later it provides a map to how an individual can consciously re-centre life and find an attractive, sustaining place to spend his or her later years.

However, because Gaines is from Alabama, raised in the hunt-and-kill and “go-get ‘im” Hemingway mould, he is not necessarily an example many Canadians would choose to emulate.

Now in the summer of 2026, with a troublesome and costly trade war being inflicted upon Canada by the current American administration, Cara and I are getting ready to head back to Ontario, happily following our usual route north of the American border. 

It is always difficult for us to depart from the South Shore area where we have summered for 25 years. As usual, we will miss it deeply. Nevertheless, we always leave with renewed expectations about the fall, winter and spring ahead for us in Peterborough.

Every summer here we find several occasions to sing with friends an old ballad called “Farewell to Nova Scotia, the sea-bound coast.” It is a bracing but sad ditty about the sea and the life it........

© Peterborough Examiner