Stony Beach, Port Maitland, Nova Scotia
I called Register.com yesterday. I picked this registrar for a reason. They have an office in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, not far from my family’s house. My family has had a tiny house in Port Maitland on the Bay of Fundy for almost 30 years.
You really need to go to Nova Scotia. This is why.
- Nova Scotia is very beautiful.
- The people there want you to come and will be extremely nice to you.
- The ferry out of Portland, Maine, which hasn’t run for several years, is going to start up again in the spring. It will go directly to Yarmouth. Happiness.
- You will have peace and quiet.
- The air is clean. The water is clean.
- You will be able to eat Rappie Pie. Just kidding. Rappie Pie is terrible. It is made out of potatoes that have been grated and squeezed in cheesecloth and cooked with chicken broth and turned into a pie filling. Let me just say that if you like poi or boiled okra you will like Rappie Pie. What you really need to eat are the best scallops in the world. We get ours in Saulnierville, at the fish market.
And, you should take up photography. And, this is why.
- When you call Register.com and talk to a wonderful person named Julie, you will be able to say so much more than “have a nice day”. You will be able to send her a photograph of Port Maitland Beach and promise her that your next blog post will be about Nova Scotia. It will make both of you a little bit happier. (As an aside, please read the comment posted by this same Julie - Julie Saulnier-Spurr to be exact. She is a proud Acadian and she loves Rappie Pie.)
Up on top is a picture of the stone beach near our house in Port Maitland. Off in the distance is our land. My 84 year-old mother and I got ourselves out to where I took this picture by thinking that it would be so much easier to keep walking and cut across the neighbor’s yard than it would be to turn back, which did not turn out to be the case. It was pretty far. Those are very tippy rocks. My retired air force colonel brother and his wife and their son staged a rescue but we didn’t need it. We were almost to the neighbor’s by the time my brother came bounding along. We were fine.
This is a picture of the tea colored marsh that feeds into the north end of Port Maitland Beach.
Foggy Morning, Port Maitland, Nova Scotia, August 2013. When I went back to this picture, I remembered that morning all over again. I like to look at my pictures many times. I need to. I don't necessarily get things right away. I like to know a place the way I know a person... in a relationship… over a period of time.
I think Nova Scotia is where my parents spent the best years of their lives… They were retired and we were grown. For the first time…they had time. Dad fished. They did projects in the house. The children and their spouses and friends and grandchildren came and we did our signature things… walked and explored the land, mowed the lawn, making it bigger and bigger, drove around, slept like cordwood where ever we possibly could, ate scallops, usually every night, painted rocks with little scenes… It was a big event if someone drove down my parents’ road. They would run to the window to see who it was. Their bedroom was not much bigger than their bed, but it has French doors and the wind from the ocean is always blowing. You can always hear it. My mom still sleeps in that bedroom, preferring it greatly to the much bigger new bedroom downstairs.
I could have picked so many pictures to show you about Nova Scotia. There are quaint little cottages, colorful fishing boats sitting high and dry on account of the enormous tides, but I wanted to show you what is most important to me…. the quiet and the coolness and the simplicity and the space (outdoors) for everyone. What a relief.