Sunday (by email)
August 11th, 2024

Hi there,

Are you up for dinner at the Pelican on Aug 19 at 5pm?

Jay and I are driving to Halifax right now. We will be back in Ottawa on Thursday. We are bringing a trailer full of belongings for our storage unit. We will also be viewing two homes. We want to find something to buy instead of paying rent while we build.

Let me know if the 19th works for you and I’ll make a reservation.

Big hugs,
Alana

I think you’ll agree that that is a hearty email. It surges with fervour and gusto. In all it is not what you’d expect in daily correspondence. Its arrival out of the blue early this afternoon has stimulated within me urgent energy. Its receipt constitutes a formidable milestone and invites incalculable anticipation.

Jay and Alana are younger friends of ours who, originally from northern Ontario and lately from  the City of Ottawa (and the Township of North Gower) have recently sold their country estate and relocated to a conspicuously private drive nearby Chester on the south shore of Nova Scotia immediately overlooking the North Atlantic Ocean. We’ve already seen photographs of the acreage and the preliminary custom construction and architecture.

This extraordinary undertaking is for us a vicarious enterprise.  Having once lived in Nova Scotia (both as a child on the north shore and subsequently while studying law at Dalhousie University in Halifax) and having always maintained an unfathomable adoration of things maritime, this current expedition of our friends affords considerable excitement and intrigue as it unfolds. It is not hidden in the least that already we look forward to seeing the new home upon its completion particularly since Jay is highly professional and an adept contractor with notable credentials.

I once quipped that if my last name began with “Mc” I would still be living in Nova Scotia. Undeniably however my lineage and historic connections have forever aligned to Upper and Lower Canada as I was born in Montréal, Québec and raised in Toronto, Ontario before moving to Almonte, Ontario at the age of 28 years (now almost half a century ago). Indeed at this very moment while glancing from my desk upon the nearby meadow and upriver passage, I confess that the nautical allure is moderately depleted by our exceedingly pleasant compact. Yet the prospect of the salt sea air is never fully extinguished.

Our friends by virtue of their private avocations are enabled to make and take this striking manoeuvre across vast provincial boundaries which we as Canadians so nonchalantly dismiss as inconsequential but which by any other standard amounts to a massive berth equivalent to the 18-hour motor distance from here to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The zeal surrounding this lifetime adventure is all the more graphic for having burgeoned quite unwittingly and equally explosively. It is too serendipitous that we plan to celebrate these skyrocketing events by rallying at Pelican, our favourite local seafood beanery, reminiscent as it is of our similarly fortuitous initial confluence on the beach of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina over a decade ago when I asked to pat their French bulldog Max.

Sea-Fever
by John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.