How the magic of rural life got the city kid a job

There is a magical 13-hectare, century-old homestead that straddles the Queens and Annapolis county lines in the very centre of Nova Scotia. A cleared hectare with a 130-year-old farmhouse surrounded by a dozen more of pine and poplar, marsh and swamp, facing a half kilometer of Pretty Mary Lake.

Pretty Mary Lake…could anyone intentionally name a lake so beautifully?

It has always felt like a magical place, with loons and turtles, bear and pheasants. Even the howl of the coyotes in the distance—although chilling—comforts you with the certainty that you are in a place where the conventions of the 21st century have very little bearing on your day-to-day life.

I am always unusually conscious of the weight of personal history in this place where our family has spent almost 40 summers exploring, loving and living. It’s not just the guest books, which begin their record of visitors the day my late father-in-law bought the place for a ridiculously small amount of money in 1973. There are no comments from the rich and famous, but there are rich, and certainly near-famous, stories recorded in those volumes. And there is a snapshot of a fairly typical eastern Canadian family as the 20th century folded into the 21st.

It’s not a place of convenience. Most of the locals shop at the Foodland or N. F. Douglas Home Hardware in nearby Caledonia. Except when they need mod-cons, then they travel an hour into Bridgewater. But with Kejimkujik National Park ten minutes away, there are summer businesses like the M & W, where Marilyn will serve you coffee, local news and the most wonderful pies, but only between May and October.
A firm—if reluctant—believer in coincidence, time and time again, the coincidences of this place astonish and befuddle me.

First, there was my partner’s mother who discovered shortly after buying the place that she had relatives buried in the local churchyard. Then there was a conversation with a long-time colleague from Prince Edward Island, who revealed he had spent many weekends decades earlier partying with former university roommates at my neighbour’s—the same weekends that dozens of our friends were doing the same just down the road. The final straw (or so I thought) came last summer when, following a weekend of Canada Day celebrations with friends and family, the stragglers who had stayed on were enjoying an evening on the veranda. A friend of my 20-something daughter was distracted by an ongoing text-mail conversation with a woman he had never met. After we had all dispersed, I was called by another the porch-dweller from that night. He had gone to his favourite pub in Yarmouth for lunch and the waitress, noting he had been missing for a few days, learned he had been near Keji. “What a coincidence,” she told him, “I was texting with a guy from near Keji just the other night. He was at a big house party deep in the woods…”

But even my father-in-law must be laughing from his grave tonight.

“Granddad” bought this place as somewhere the family could drop all the stress of modern life and enjoy each other—a place where we could relearn what family and community really meant. My three children grew up here (when they weren’t busy enjoying their real lives in the city) and my youngest, who is just approaching 20, long ago made it clear that he would be the guy who would keep grandfather’s legacy alive.

He finished his formal training as a bricklayer last week. All that remained to ensure his certificate—and 600 hours of apprenticeship credit—was five days of work placement. He called every company on the list given him by his instructor. No opportunities. He called the small company with whom he had done a placement in the fall. No work. He even called the president of the union, who told him that he would hire him if he had work.

Boy’s predicament weighed heavily on his parents. His mother, who works in the mental health care system, was bemoaning her frustration with colleagues last week. A doctor said “Oh, I have a friend with a small masonary company. I’ll call him.” She set it up, and the kid got his week’s placement.

Yesterday, he was offered a labourer’s job on the project, just four days after starting his placement. The offer came during a conversation with the site manager—who is the other partner in the company. When my son admitted that he did need weekends to get down to the country, the manager offering the job suddenly realized that my son was the kid at the old farmhouse from down home, and that his mother, Marilyn, had known him since he was a seven-day-old baby. My son countered with his own terms—hire me as an apprentice mason and give me a few days off in August for a family reunion. The deal was sealed.

Tonight, even the wonderful song of the spring peepers, the sight of my dogs dozing by the stove and the glory of the Lyrid meteor shower overhead in the night sky can only begin to describe why I am in love with this magical, mystical place.