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...
18 days 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...
22 days 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 2 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...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
THE BI-WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. House hunts. A crowd sourced list of many trusted tradespersons in the province. Small rituals that mean you've become one of us. Two questions kept surfacing underneath all of it. Where do I look. And once I get there, who do I know. Recent Blog Posts Nova Scotia Tax Sales: What the YouTube Videos Don't Tell You Tax sales sound like the back door everyone else missed. They're real, but they...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
When you retire after thirty years, people throw you a party. Nobody asks how it feels to wake up on Monday with nowhere to be. When you finish school, everyone talks about what comes next. Nobody sits with you in the grief of a world that is closing. When you get sober, people celebrate your strength. Nobody acknowledges the self you had to leave behind to get there. When something ends, people focus on what comes next. Nobody makes room for what you're letting go. When you become a parent,...
2 months ago • 4 min read
THE BI-WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. This week the group did two things at once. It threw open its arms for a newcomer's big landing, and it sat with a private grief someone almost didn't have the nerve to post. Both are in the recap below. If you only read one thing, read the line near the bottom about carrying more than one home in your heart. Two blog posts went out this cycle too, and both land right on time. One is the bug...
2 months ago • 4 min read