THE BI-WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. Friends, firewood, egg prices and very strong opinions about pizza. That was the group these last two weeks. It looked like a grab bag at first. Underneath, almost every thread was circling the same question. How do you get settled before winter shows up? Recent Blog Posts Are Nova Scotians Actually Friendlier, or Do You Just Feel Tolerated? Everyone hears that Nova Scotia is friendly. What...
21 days ago • 2 min read
THE BI-WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. Belonging. Trade-offs. What just becomes normal. The last two weeks in the group kept circling the same question from different directions. When does this place actually start to feel like yours and what do you give up to get there. A pattern showed up almost every time someone answered honestly. The moment was never big. It just showed up quietly, usually somewhere nobody was expecting it....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
THE BI-WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. Money, work, coming home. Two weeks of conversation kept circling back to one of those three things. What it actually costs to live here. How to rebuild a career or a business once you land. What it means to come back after years away. A pattern emerged across almost all of them. Nobody in the group doubted Nova Scotia was beautiful. What surprised people was the math. Recent Blog Posts Every...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
THE BI-WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. Here's one for the news pile: the couple all over headlines this week for trading British Columbia land prices for a Nova Scotia farm are already in this group. Celina and Nick run Back to Nature Acres. Blueberries, citrus trees and a full menagerie are heading east with them this September. Fifty acres here cost about the same as a one bedroom condo back home. That's what made the decision for...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Audra Williams and her partner Haritha came to Nova Scotia to work at a café in Mahone Bay in January 2022. He would run the front of house. They would live in the apartment upstairs, rent free. It was a plan with almost no risk in it. Five weeks after they arrived, the owners decided to sell the building. The apartment went with it. Haritha had no work. They had no place to live. THE DETOUR They spent the next stretch of time being caught by other people, two months in their friend...
2 months ago • 6 min read
THE BI-WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. Hello! I want to share what's been happening in the From Away community. Our Facebook group had a ton of posts over the last two weeks, since summer in Nova Scotia is hitting its best season. No bugs (ok, some bugs), great weather (ok, it was actually pretty humid this week) and everything is open (except Mondays, you know how it is). Outside the group, out in the province, some other stuff...
3 months ago • 4 min read
There is a particular kind of lonely that has nothing to do with being alone. You are standing in a kitchen, or a grocery store line, or a friend's living room, and someone says something ordinary. A new restaurant. A recipe. A trip they're planning. And some part of you lights up, because you have a whole life's worth of context for that one small thing, and for half a second you think you get to share it. Then you watch the room decide what to do with you. S. knows this feeling from the...
3 months ago • 4 min read
THE BI-WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. Land. Belonging. The bill. People are still explaining why they moved here, just to a different audience now. They're working harder than expected to build real friendships. And more than one is thinking about what it really costs to stay. None of that means anyone's walking it back. It means the honeymoon window is closing for a lot of you, and what's underneath it is the real work of a life...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Nova Scotia didn't lose people quietly in the nineties. It lost them the way a body loses too much blood at once, one door closing after another, until an entire generation understood there wasn't enough here to build a future on. Nurses. Coal miners. Steelworkers. Deckhands. If you left this province in those years because the job you trained for simply didn't exist here anymore, you already know this story before I tell it to you. L. is one version of it. Hers is worth telling in full. She...
3 months ago • 6 min read