[It's a small world. Even though Disney kind of took over that phrase with the saccharine song, the words ring true in this part of the world. As this next guest post shows, a smaller community simply brings with it access of all kinds.]

By Philip Moscovitch

(Photo credit: Philip Moscovitch)

Back in the mid-90s, my partner Sara and I were living in Montreal and thinking about moving to the country. Trouble was, to get to an area rural enough for us, we’d have to drive well over an hour outside the city. If either of us had to commute for work, we’d be in trouble. Plus, available housing seemed to be either unaffordable, or in a state of near collapse. Neither option was all that appealing.

So we moved to Nova Scotia. Thirteen years later we’re still here, living in a 100-year-old home overlooking St. Margaret’s Bay, with about 30 acres of woodland in our name and much more stretching out for miles behind our property.

Part of what we wanted when we came to the Maritimes was easy access to the natural world. But I’ve also really come to appreciate how friendly people and the small scale of this place combine to provide access to all sorts of people and experiences.

Need to talk to your member of the legislature? Mine is a cabinet minister; I have her personal email address (which she encouraged me to use) and whenever I’ve raised a concern, she responds.

Like pomp and vice-regal ceremony? Not my cup of tea, particularly, but I’ve still managed to attend a couple of events at which the Lieutenant-Governor was present, and after she visited our local elementary a few years back, she wrote a personal response to a girl who lived near us. That made a huge impression on her.

Want to go wilderness canoeing? The Tobeatic Wilderness Area provides over a thousand square kilometres of raw nature. I can drive there in a couple of hours.

Interested in star-gazing? There are truly dark skies within an hour or two of driving, and reasonably dark ones right here in our own yard, where we can easily see thousands of stars on a clear night.

And, of course, if country living is not all that far from the city, the reverse is also true. It’s pretty easy to get to town anytime you want. When I have a gig that requires me to work in downtown Halifax, I’m facing a modest, 45-minute commute. That’s how long it used to take me sometimes to get from our Montreal apartment to my job at the National Film Board. And that was bumper-to-bumper, not the relatively pleasant drive from here to the peninsula.

I remember realizing that we really were living in a different culture soon after the birth of our third child (the only one born in Nova Scotia). We’d sent the paperwork to Vital Statistics to register his birth and hadn’t received a birth certificate. Concerned that it may have been held up, I called the department and was immediately transferred to someone in the appropriate department. After I gave her our son’s name she said, “Oh yes dear, I saw that one. It went out today.”

Philip Moscovitch is a freelance writer, editor, broadcaster. You can connect with him through his website, www.moscovitch.com, or follow him on twitter @PhilMoscovitch.

[Wrapping up our pre-Canada Games posts for the week is another guest post from a friend who's been making use of the Oval with his family. Don't forget to check out the cute video capturing the missing skate.]

By Andrew Leitao

Baby steps on the Oval

The Canada Games are coming, and with them comes the Big O. My family and I (2 adults, a 2.5 and .5 year old) were very excited when it first opened to the public. Got our skates and headed over. There were so many people on the Oval, you could barely see the ice. Our 2.5 year old Gabrielle was raring to go and experience her first skate. It lasted 30 seconds. I forgot to tighten the nut on her cheese cutter skates (double blade that fits over the boot). Thankfully, mommy was there to figure it out and get her on her way…until she fell.

Many tears later and with some coaxing, Gabrielle continued and made it a quarter of the way around until she wanted to get off. A bit of a rough start, but fun nonetheless. Since then, we’ve been quite a few more times. Each outing has driven Gabrielle to skate a little further on her quest to complete a loop. She finally acheived it on a beautiful crisp Saturday afternoon. Papa and mommy were very proud.

The Big O is a great space for all types to enjoy some healthy out door physical activity. It’s a place for community. By the look of joy on everyone’s faces, you can feel that this is a facility that needs to stay.

Having said that, I hope it’s done in a fashion that keeps it sustainable. It’s great to be gung ho, but let’s have a plan.

Oh, and there’s plenty of grass on the commons for the people who always complain about the grass…just saying…

[By now I'm somewhere in Amsterdam with Cokebaby enjoying the first few days of a two week vacation. This next guest post comes from someone who recently vacationed on the East Coast, in one of my fave spots in this province: Cheticamp. Enjoy!]

(Photo credit: Lauren Anderson)

By Lauren Anderson

For some reason or another –  a simple love of the beach or some sort of primal yearning – my husband and I tend to gravitate toward coastal areas when we vacation. We’ve been to Maui twice, and once to Australia, and spent a lovely few days a couple of years ago in Victoria, where we walked everywhere and fed bits of fish and chips to a more or less domesticated seal that lived near the wharf for just that very reason. Each time, we breathe the salt air and enjoy the calmer pace of life and ask ourselves why, really, anyone would ever want to live in Ontario.

We both grew up here, and are likely here for the long haul, and there are a great many things to recommend it, but scenery is not among them, at least not in the flat, fairly urban part of the province we live in. It’s a little dull, and full of WalMarts, humid in the summer and fairly miserable in the winter, and we’re what feels like a zillion miles away from any body of water you could actually take seriously. But our family and friends are all here, and our careers, and that place on the other side of town that makes the best blueberry pancakes, the stationary store downtown that I love, the Christmas tree farm with the tallest trees and the free cider, so it’s a little difficult to imagine home being anywhere else.

So, we get our scenic fix the same way most landlocked people do, through regular vacations. The plan this summer was two weeks on the East coast, where my husband had visited as a small child several decades ago, and where I had read about enough during my obsessive consumption of Anne of Green Gables as a pre-teen that I had pre-emptively fallen in love. Through a series of very fortunate events, we managed to find a cottage rental on Cape Breton Island for a very reasonable price, and planned to spend the last few days of our trip in Halifax.

Our cottage, a few minutes outside of Cheticamp, was secluded and quiet, with a tremendous view of the highlands. We swam in the ocean, which was…invigorating. (A little girl, splashing around at the edge of the water, greeted me heartily in French as I dashed back to my chair and something about that interaction managed to warm me more than my towel.) We hiked up in the mountains, standing breathlessly on the trail as a moose partook of elevensies about ten feet from where we were standing.  We ate a lot of seafood

When I hurt my foot, the local pharmacy gave me an ice pack and wouldn’t let me pay for it. My dad’s colleague, who I hadn’t seen in ten years or so, insisted we come for dinner with his family. The staff at Tim Hortons took their time and no one honked at us when Samantha, our GPS system, couldn’t figure out a way to clearly communicate where we should turn. I can’t figure out how to express what it all felt like to someone from Ontario. It was at once expansive and cozy. Seductive and plain.

On our third day in Nova Scotia, my husband started looking at real estate online. There are so many good reasons why it is never going to happen, but it is, for so many other reasons, very nice to feel so at home somewhere – even briefly – that the very idea of disrupting your life and relocating to another province doesn’t seem like such a disruption at all, and you start half-heartedly contemplating laying down a fistful of bills for that overpriced box of lobsters at the airport in a vain attempt to make it all last a little longer.

Lauren is a freelance copywriter and blogger living in Southwestern Ontario with her husband, cats, and a dog that welcomed her enthusiastically enough that it took most of the sting out of coming home from vacation.

[This guest post comes courtesy of one of the lovely people I met IRL at BookCamp Halifax earlier this year. If you're interested in sharing your East Coast experience (whether you live here, have lived here, or you're a tourist), check out the submission guidelines for East Coast Guest Posts.]

Photo credit: Christine Gordon Manley

By Christine Gordon Manley

I am an East Coaster by birth, and, despite trying to live elsewhere, I am proud to say I remain East Coast by choice. I grew up in Newfoundland, surrounded by sea and rock, and moved to Prince Edward Island shortly after high school, where I became surrounded by field and clay. I left PEI for one year to pursue an MA across the pond in England, and while the Thames did soothe my need to be close to water, it just wasn’t the same, and I was pleased to return to PEI (my now adopted home) after the completion of my course in 2003.

A reality of living in Atlantic Canada is that many of us do find ourselves having to leave for a brief time. In 2006, my husband and I decided to try our luck at “greener employment pastures,” so to speak, and followed the lure of Ontario—a land that promised more opportunity, more money, more adventures, more everything. Our lives in Ontario were good and we did enjoy some of this “more” (and we even lived in close proximity to Lake Ontario, satisfying my water need), but I found myself surprised to crave the “lesses” of PEI: less noise, less consumerism, less stuff. We had our first child in Ontario and have shared some wonderful memories there, but when I, along with many in the doomed economic year of 2009, was laid off, we took it as a sign to return to our less-is-more homeland.

Deciding to return East was easy; actually doing it was not. Job hunting while living in another province is never fun, and there were additional complications of finding employment for both my husband and I, selling our house, finding a place to live (temporary and permanent), transferring medical records, merging two different immunization schedules, and arranging daycare. Our family couldn’t even move here at the same time: my daughter and I moved here four months before my husband was able to join us. I won’t go into the details of how all of these tasks made my head hurt, but it was a good six months of living here before we felt settled as a family, and another three or four months before we felt truly comfortable.

Now, a year and a half later, we are happy. Atlantic Canada is known for its unique sense of community, and there’s no stronger word for what we feel connected to on PEI. We live in a tree-enclosed, isolated neighbourhood where neighbours become friends, even the dogs know each other, and everyone waves when getting the mail. Whenever we venture out, whether to a local farmers’ market, the beach, downtown Victoria Row, or just a local playground, we often see friends and neighbours. We became friendly with our next-door neighbours because our kids (who were refreshingly and blissfully unaware of social protocol) would wander into each others’ homes.

Even the online community here is well connected: both my husband and I are proud to be active members in the PEI Twitter-sphere and have met amazing people this way. We attended a local PEI Tweet-Up and are helping to plan an Island-wide picnic later this summer. I am a member of the Island Tweethearts, a group of twelve young professional women who meet monthly to share business ideas and just enjoy each other’s company. And my magazine, Edwards Magazine, has flourished, not dwindled, at being “rooted” in PEI—I am blessed to have had the best of both worlds, merging an Island publication with national contacts to create a Canadian magazine. These connections can happen easily here, and we feel like finally, after years of wandering, we belong.

And it’s not just PEI. I often think of my birthplace, experiencing waves of longing whenever I catch an episode of Republic of Doyle or see a Newfoundland and Labrador tourism ad that highlights its overpowering landscape, its colour, and its rugged beauty. Living on PEI makes me feel more connected to my other Island home, and I know that visits are not out of the realm of possibility. I love being able to do day or weekend trips to New Brunswick or Nova Scotia. Basically, living within a stone’s throw to all the Atlantic provinces puts a smile on my face.

It’s funny. I lived in PEI a long time before being this at peace. When I moved here in 1997, I was surrounded by the same landscape as I am now. I visited the same beaches. I ate at the same restaurants. But it wasn’t until we made an active decision to move back that I felt truly blessed to live here, instead of just living here out of necessity or waiting until the Next Big Phase that would take us away again.

Driving to a local ice cream shop the other day, my husband and I began talking about the insane beauty of this place.

Him: “It truly is beautiful here.”

Me: “It was always beautiful. We’re just appreciating it now.”

Christine Gordon Manley currently works at the UPEI Centre for Education Research where she serves as communications officer, research coordinator, and all-around Jill of All Trades.When she’s not working with educational researchers, Christine can be found all over the internet. She runs her own freelance editing business, is the founder and editor of Edwards Magazine and the Edwards Book Club, and practices both her writing skills and her running at Share the Run, a blog she started to form a community of runners and co-bloggers. Christine is also a member of the Island Tweethearts.

[I've got a special guest on the blog today. Please welcome the author of More Money Than Brains:Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, and Idiots Think They're Right. Great title, isn't it? If you're interested in winning a copy, CBC Books is running a contest on Twitter all week. All you have to do is tweet a 140-character (or less) book review using the hashtag #cbc140.]

Photo credit: greatislander from Flickr

By Laura Penny

I am East Coast by birth and by choice. I grew up in Sydney, moved to Halifax for my BA at King’s and then returned after grad school in London, Ontari-ari-ari-o and Buffalo, New York. One of the reasons why I returned to Halifax is that it has beaucoup de universities. Moreover, the majority of them are sensibly located in the downtown core, where they help keep the embattled ecosystem of the city centre alive-ish.

Western, and my SUNY campus, were much further from what remained of their respective downtowns, and this is one of the factors that aided and abetted their decline. Buffalo was a particularly sad husk of its former self, its downtown so doornail-dead you could almost see tumbleweeds in front of the ex-banks and zombie storefronts.

Halifax’s downtown is, admittedly, not in great shape, but it would be far, far worse without the kids, the drunk kids, the donair-scarfing kids, redistributing their parentbucks, student loan cheddar and part-time wages. The universities are an important part of the local economy, but they also help keep the city walkable, livable and relatively civilized, for all the South Enders might bitch about the noise and occasional puke splotches on their pricey lawns.

The province has never treated the universities like they oughta. Instead of looking at them as an asset, as one of the few consistently successful industries in the province, we seem to regard them as a cash suck, a way to transfer tax dollars from hardworking everyday Nova Scotians to uppity professors who wouldn’t know a day’s work if it bit them on the arse.

This attitude—which what More Money Than Brains is about, btw—is only exacerbated by hard times. The province is waaay broke. The province is oldifying at an alarming rate. An NDP government has less leeway to be spendy than any other party, as the populace is quick to cry kommie-nist and invoke the dread spectre of Bob Rae.

The NDP will, as many of you know, release the results of Dr. Tim O’ Neill’s inquiry into the state of our universities this June. And I am sore afeared, suspecting cuts at least and amalgamation, an idea too dumb to die, at worst.

Our universities do have one real, structural problem. And as soon as flesh people once again rule our fair land, the provincial government needs to rectify it. It is a tax problem. We don’t have too many universities. We have too few taxpayers. We don’t ding the droves of Torontonian or Left-Coast students for being interprovincial in the same way that we overcharge international students…and I don’t think we should.

In short: the feds need to make sure the dollars are going where the students are. We need to make sure they keep coming here, invite more and encourage more of them to stay.

So my belated, delusionally optimistic advice to Tim O’ Neill is this: INVEST. Hose yer precious nerd gardens with cash. Turning this sleepy city by the sea into one of North America’s premier post-secondary destinations—totally doable for less than all the breaks for fly-by-night call centres—is an investment that will pay off for decades to come, with bonuses that go beyond the purely economic.

Just think, maybe someday some environmental studies geek at Dal’s new College of Sustainability will come up with an effective way to clean up all that impending ugly in the tar sands. And then we can charge those Albertan bastards an arm and a leg for it! What could be more spitefully delicious for Bluenosers young and old, for the greens and the merely green-with-envy?

Education is always the poor, red-headed stepchild of the budget, forever less than health care, the absolute priority for the olds that vote. And the fact that Nova Scotia governments routinely schedule elections as soon as those pesky come-from-away kids skedaddle for the summer says much more than my crabby, over-educated ass can about how much the government really values education and those who choose to pursue it here.

Author of the Canadian bestseller Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit (a Globe and Mail Best Book of the year), Laura Penny has a PhD in Comparative Literature, a MA in Theory and Criticism and a BA in Contemporary Studies and English. She has worked as a bookstore clerk, a student activist, a union organizer, a university instructor and her writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Saturday Night, and Toronto Life. She lives in Halifax where she teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University.

[I'm away in NYC so I'll keep this intro short. This next guest is a local freelance writer and MSVU alum like me. Check out Halifax Magazine for an interview she did with me among others in the July issue.]

By Alison DeLory

I moved to Toronto in 1989 to study journalism at Ryerson University. The week I arrived I listened to a first-person account on CBC Radio One by a man who’d moved back to Halifax after living six years in Toronto. His chief complaint about Toronto was that you didn’t get an unobstructed view of Lake Ontario when you drove along the Gardiner Expressway the way coastal drives in Nova Scotia afford spectacular views of the Atlantic Ocean. I barely heard the rest. I just kept thinking—six years! I could not imagine living in Toronto for so long. I thought I’d be back in Halifax right after I graduated in three years.

Well, it took 18 years. In 2007 I finally made the move back home. True, it didn’t work out exactly as I’d planned, but life happens that way sometimes and I had valid reasons for staying put. I found a magazine job in Toronto at a time when no Halifax media outlets were hiring. Then I met a guy, bought a house, got married, had a couple of kids and on it went. I wouldn’t say I was trapped but I was rooted in Toronto, happily so. But I always had the itch to move back.

Leaving Toronto was complicated. I wasn’t the same 19-year-old who’d moved there with one suitcase. I was leaving a job I loved, a home I’d painstakingly renovated, a wonderful group of friends and the city’s best neighbourhood—Bloor West Village. Harder still was uprooting my husband, who’s not a Maritimer and who had a successful Toronto-based business, and our kids, who had started school, joined sports teams and clubs, and made their first best friends. There were days when I was packing that I lay on the bed and cried with anxiety, doubt and guilt.

Moving back wasn’t easy. But has it been worth it?

I left the salaried working world to go freelance, unaware that everyone in Halifax operates using connections. After 18 years away, on a professional level, I had no connections. It’s taken time to establish myself as a writer and editor locally but I feel good about how far I’ve come—hey, I’m guest blogging on East Coast by Choice! I’ve also found time and inspiration to complete a few creative writing projects and will begin my Master of Public Relations degree this fall. These accomplishments would have been impossible in my hectic Toronto life.

Most of my family is still here. I was damn glad to be in Halifax when my dad needed triple bypass surgery two summers ago. My children have a close relationship with their grandparents, and an aunt, uncle and cousin they barely knew previously. Holidays now are packed with people, great food and laughter.

I live in a much more spacious home, that’s both minutes from downtown but far enough away that I regularly spot deer in my front and back yards. The kids walk to school by themselves, and after, climb trees in the small woods on our property. It’s truly idyllic. When I want to go downtown, I have lots of old and new friends who love checking out Halifax’s shopping, restaurants and arts scene.

Photo credit: Ali A from Flickr

My husband’s still running his business from Toronto, commuting regularly and not complaining much when he gets fogged in or out of Halifax. He may have had the most difficult adjustment but seems completely content to be a come-from-away. It was he who pointed out, on this past Sunday’s family bike ride through St. Margaret’s Bay and on to Hubbards Beach, that even if such breathtakingly beautiful scenery existed in Toronto the road to get there would be so congested it would be impossible to enjoy it.

I do ache for Ontario, especially when I see the “There’s no place like this” ads on TV, but it’s equally true that there’s no place like home. And you really can’t compare the view from the Gardiner Expressway to the view from the coastal Lighthouse Route.

Alison DeLory is a freelance writer/editor, teacher, communications consultant, author, runner, parent, explorer and more

[I'm back in Toronto for the rest of the week, here for work and for BookCamp Toronto where I'll be co-facilitating a session about online community building. I'll be leading a similar session at BookCamp Halifax and would love to see you at the event. Register here and spread the word to ensure the inaugural event is a success.]

By Justine MacDonald

Photo credit: ShootsNikon from Flickr

Drive through any village, any ‘one street town’ in Nova Scotia and what do you see? A few stately homes? Perhaps. You’ll definitely come across some that have seen better days. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a handful of shops and services with, at most, another handful hidden away in people’s homes or off the beaten track.

This is how my town is. Drive down Highway #1 in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley and you’ll travel through my village. It’s not quite ‘blink and you’ll miss it’, though I still wouldn’t recommend it — the road is quite curvy. We have that handful of businesses that are easy to find and the handful that perhaps only the locals know about (and even that’s debatable). Two of our three churches will never hear another prayer or echo with spiritual song. All of the community organizations struggle to keep going with a dwindling, aging membership and no fresh blood.

We have a ‘wrong side of the tracks’ — even if the abandoned rail bed is now free of actual tracks. During the summer, the village is quiet from the lack of college students; aside from one week when the attention of much of the valley turns to us and our exhibition grounds. This is all anyone sees of this little community; perhaps it’s all you see of yours as well.

Take a closer look: you’ll be amazed at what you’ll find. Your town may not be as boring as you think it is…or at least it wasn’t always that way.

Take a walk. Hundreds of miles of that abandoned rail bed weave through the valley, happy to lead you wherever you’d like to explore…if you’ll take its lead. Here, a treasure can be found just passed the pool. Visit in the spring, when it seems as if winter has left for good, and you’ll see winter hasn’t given up yet, refusing to release its hold on the banks of the stream. At this time of year, the stream roars, fat and swift, down to the Annapolis. I love to carefully follow it further up the hill; I’m guaranteed not to see another person.

Take a look back in time, even just a few decades. What do you find? How has it changed? Is there any way to get back to that or is it gone forever? Is that history preserved or is it about to be lost as you lose the elders in your community? Within recent memory, my village had a bustling commercial district. The train station always seemed busy. The village band played at the grandstand on the river’s island every week. The seats in all the churches were full.

That island disappeared, I’m guessing, around the time the power plant was built further down the river. This was also the nail in the coffin for the ship building industry in the next town over. Looking at the small, struggling town now, you’d ever dream that large ships were as common in town — sailing in and being built — as the train had been; serving the large apple industry, the boot factory, the distillery. In between, hidden deep in the jungle-like forest, lies an abandoned lumber town. Only a few foundations, and the gravestones, remain to remind people of its existence.

We are lucky to have a couple that is passionate about researching and preserving our history in not one, but six (and counting) published volumes — SIX! Proof that one should not judge a place by the surface. Take a closer look and you’ll find an interesting story or two…or six…about your East Coast town.

Justine MacDonald (@AuroraLee on Twitter) made her way to Nova Scotia via the military. She’s currently an admin assistant by day and an aspiring writer in her free time. She also enjoys photography, design and much, much more!

[Oops. It was so busy last week that I neglected to put up a guest post! This next guest was one of the people who called in to the live chat on CBC Maritime Noon back in January. Here's her experience of living on the East Coast.]

Photo credit: Duane_Brown from Flickr

By Teri Metler

I am from Taiwan and met my husband there too. We had a licensed ESL school in Taiwan and had more than 230 students,until I sold it at 2008. My husband was born and raised in Ontario, he came over to Taiwan twenty years ago by chance, and we got married in 1994. We started our own business and had my first child the following year. Every summer and Christmas we went back to Ontario to visit his family.

In April 1999 my second child was born and four months later a huge earth quake hit Taiwan. Our apartment was right on the epicenter, with a magnitude of 7.3 on the Richter Scale! That night was a unforgettable night. After living in the tent for a couple months we decided to bring our kids to Canada (as we planned for grandmother to meet the new grandson) while we were in Welland, Ontario my friend called me and informed me that our apartment got looted ,cause we weren’t there so we left my five years old daughter in Canada with grandma, and my husband and I took the six months old son back to Taiwan with us. Before we went back to Taiwan, by a really special chance we bought a cottage in Haliburton, Ontario. After we dealt with the earthquake issue, we stayed with my mother in Taiwan but went back to Ontario every summer, this is one of the reason I think if one day we move back to Canada, Ontario would be the first choice.

My life in Taiwan was very comfortable,our business was making good money, my two kids both went to international school, we own couple real estate and most important thing was I lived close to my mother. I have so many friends around…but one day my husband came to me and told me that he wants to give our kids a better environment, he wants to move back to Canada, so our kids can become real Canadians.
Being a business woman for so long, my instinct told me my husband must be out of his mind! He wants to give up the good chance here and go back to Canada and start over again? I guess I just couldn’t say no to him , with the saying that my mother often tell me” Follow the man you marry,be he a goof or a crook—a woman shares the fate of the man she married, no matter what he is—this is not what he really wants, he is thinking to move back to Canada, cause he wants his children grow up in Canada.

2005 Christmas my husband and I took a trip to Nova Scotia, (while we were visiting in Canada again) to look at the house that his Real Estate agent found for him. The next thing I knew was my two kids and I were living there and my husband will flying between Taiwan and Nova Scotia.

We now living in the property that used to be a saw mill, there is a river running through and 30 acre land in the back of the house. Our house is quite old but in a good condition. My first year when just my two kids and I were here in the winter, living in a big old drafty house in the winter is a big challenge for me.
Many times I got lost on the high way or slipped out the road cause the snow, staring at the gas pump cause I don’t know how to self serve…my son’s first 13 stitches…my daughter’s midnight emergency for appendicitis.

I survived all the new challenges in the past couple years.I slowly fit in life here and I have made new friends, I learn new stuff and I watch my children growing up in a safe little town, and this is my story in the East Coast.

Teri Metler lives In Middleton, Nova Scotia where she lives with a dreamer, two wonderful kids, and three pets. Her blog, written in Chinese, can be found here.

[There's nothing like a good fog to set the scene for some storytelling. This next guest (@stefaniewrites) offers a snapshot of an experience at the Tall Ships in the rain. If you have a story to tell about the East Coast, please feel free to drop me a line by e-mail at kimberly.aliasgrace [at] gmail [dot] com or DM me on Twitter. I’m looking for submissions year-round and have spots upcoming in my schedule.]

Photo courtesy of Stefanie Wilson

By Stefanie Wilson

It was going to rain. I don’t find it rains as much here as people said it would. But when it does rain, it rains all day. To be perfectly honest—that’s my kind of rain. The kind you can plan for. You usually know it’s coming and you know it’s going to last. You can look forward to indoor activities. Curl up and read a book. Watch a movie. Without having to deal with the possibility that the sun might come out and upend your plans. That’s what it was like where we came from. It would pour for a few hours in the morning and then the sun would come out and taunt us, “It’s a lovely day now, you should come outside.” I was happy to shed that imperative and settle into full rainy days. But not that day. It was going to rain and I was going to be out in it.

We had planned to walk down to see the Tall Ships while they were docked. The girls love the masts and the sails, the painted hulls—in truth, the pirate-like quality of the ships. We had planned to walk down because we knew the parking would be crazy and, well, because we could. We walk everywhere we can now that we live in Halifax. Now that we’re not forced into the car by distance and roadways built without thought to pedestrians. And that day, we were going to walk in the rain.

What’s a little rain? The girls would be cozy and dry in the double stroller—they’ll still squeeze in to humour us. I don’t know what I’ll do once they decide they’re done with it. The distances we usually walk are just too long for their little legs—often an hour each way, at mommy and daddy pace. So, we need to take advantage of it while we can. Rain or shine.

We started out into the damp and misty air. We’re glad we did. The ships were incredible. Like ghost ships hidden in banks of fog. The girls loved it. So did we. But during our quick duck into the Henry House—to fortify ourselves for the trek back home—it started to pour. We looked at each other with twinkling eyes. And decided to embrace it. After all, we’re Haligonians now. And we did know it was going to rain.

Stefanie Wilson (writebrain.ca) is a writer who specializes in advertising, marketing communications and the like. She thinks a lot. Too much, really. She lives in a wonderful Halifax home with her patient husband and adorable daughters. She is grateful that Kimberly would let her voice her thoughts on her blog.