If there's one thing bluenosers adore, it's the kind of weather that justifies commemorative coffee table books.

TIDAL SURGE! TREES DOWN! CECIL ZINCK'S BOAT GOT ALL SMASHED UP ON THE ROCKS IN THE FRONT HARBOUR! All aflutter, lining up for batteries, water, propane. Granted, it was only the tail end of a hurricane. But enough to park in front of the fire and scramble eggs on the barbeque.

Not that a power outage is so unexpected — in this province, belch too close to a pole and you'll bring down the lights from Herring Cove to Prospect.

I can't help but feel at home here. Even when I'd rather be at home somewhere else.

Perched at the edge of a meat-grinder sea. Craggy and stunted, churned up. Weathered churches and dead houses and antique barns, not froofy antiques but bashed-up old stuff from ships and garrisons permeated, to this day, with the scents of tar and gunpowder. All facing the growing swell, the angry sky. Fishing boats clinging to the leeside of wharves, battened down.

Rarely the drama that is forecast, but still — candles illuminate as wind buffets the house, and tucked in, in love, we are most fortunate.

++++++++

Happy six month / three month birthday, my smiley boy.

Ben's adjusted age is now half of his actual age and from here on out, his prematurity will be rendered less and less significant.

He pulls himself upright to sitting, with help, weeble-wobbling. Squeals with delight at his father and grocery store clerks and book clubbers and passerby, a social boy just like his brother. Giggles when tickled in the folds of his neck. Tells the most fantastic stories.

What follows is the most ordinary of scenes, but I'm happy to share it, because we've been waiting to be ordinary for what feels like a lifetime.

The mountain forests of British Columbia are like cathedrals, sacred and ancient. Thousand year-old hallways and altars and grand columns that rise from rich, deep moss-velvet. You walk in this place humbled, a guest of the gods.

The place that became us is so vastly foreign to the place that birthed us.

Full circle in Nova Scotia, land of pirates and rum-runners and a meat grinder sea. The woods here are a shag carpet of stunted and unassuming gnarliness. Legions of black spruce stand like matchsticks in comparison, more hardy and honest than show-stoppingly glorious.

We drove home today from the hospital, from one boy to another, and I rested my head against the car window, stared out at this land-borne ocean of brackish green.

And suddenly there he was: my Liam, the blur whizzing past him, full of amazement.

I had told him, you see, during that long night as we lay through spells of breathing, and spells of not: rest now but come back whenever you like, sweet boy. Come back and pour yourself into my ear, and sit down cross-legged in front of my eyeballs. And I’ll move my head back and forth and take you places, and show you the most wonderful things.

A wall of threadbare jacks, weed trees thick in a bog. But look, my boy! Ahh, look. How straight they stand, stripped bare and spindly but proud of their prickly tuft. Stubborn through the winter, up to mischief with the crows. Aren’t they just perfect, just as they are.

There’s another of Liam’s gifts. His soul is inside me again, the way he started. And so I’ll take note of the world for him. Beauty and nourishment, through my eyes and all my senses.

Look, sweet son. How you would have loved all this.

++++++++++

Evan watches me earnestly as I pump, eyes fixed on the drip- drip- drip.

"Mama make a-boobie milk," he declares. "Aaahhh… (as if deciding) …a dis one for Ben, a dis one for Leee-am."

I decide it may as well be now.

"Evan sweetie, Liam doesn’t need mama’s milk anymore. He’s a star now, watching over you, strong and brave. He’s okay, he’s a happy baby now."

He scrunches his forehead in disapproval.

"No mama, dis one’s for Leee-am. Dat one’s for Ben. Dis one for Leee-am. Leee-am! Ahhh… Thomas. James. Skarloey. Misser Toppem Hat. Twubblesome twucks. GORDON!"

And he huffs off importantly to arrange his trains into lines of orderly submission.

My throat swells again at the loss he can’t yet grasp. An almost gravitational withdrawl pulls me into sorrow, to immersion in what Liam should have been, at the expense of all others.

But instead, thanks to his big brother, I smile at how rich we are. As rich as Rockefeller.

Here we are at a u-pick in Lunenburg, our home county and world capital of christmas trees, tall ships and pirates. They sell these trees on streetcorners in Manhattan for $400 apiece, proving that entrepreneurship trumps even the most carefully honed Maritime sensibilities, every time.

 

Evan, two hours late for his nap, is just about to break out into a wail, kick Justin in the head and flip over backwards to run away into the snow and slip on an iced-up mud puddle. I am squinting, because it wouldn't be a picture of me if I weren't. Justin is being a saint, because it wouldn't be a picture of him if he weren't.

And all of us unintentionally sport matching puffy vests - because the family that dresses together... what? Gets beat up on the playground together? Touch-eh.

The headlines these days... alarming, aren't they? Madness and carelessness and arrogance and an over-abundance of self-obsessed nutjobs. We're at the brink of something. Or past it. People and countries so alienated and marginalized that the attention they crave can only be captured with threats and deviousness and hatred and stockpiling.

I can't imagine that this will turn out alright. I'm sorry to say it, but that's the truth. There's too much of the stuff out there, more than we can even comprehend (most of it parked right next door in the U.S.) waiting for accidents or the wrong hands or a moment of indulgent rage.

The majority of adults become parents. We go through this universally human journey together, millions of individuals feeding their babies, laughing at the first fart, spinning with joy at every giggle. How is it that we don't we have the preciousness and fragility of life burned onto our brains and hearts? How is it that the most fundamentally shared life experiences don't guide our actions?

I see the latest Al-Qaeda video on the news (for the love of Christ, WHY do they keep broadcasting these guys?) and hear hysterical war declarations from North Korea (before I lunge for the radio's off-button quicker than an ostrich on fire). And strangely, I don't feel anger. I feel pity.

Dysfunction makes people do dangerous and hateful things. Anyone with such a twisted heart... they can't have had a happy life, with love and adventure and education and family and free will and friendships. Am I wrong to make that assumption? Maybe. But it's the only logic I can understand.

I’d like to take Kim Jong-il for a ride on the Scrambler at a Bill Lynch fair. I’d like to have him at Milford House for a weekend, knock him out of bed at 5:30 AM for a sunrise canoe paddle through the rapids at Gang Run and then for a mile-high stack of pancakes and hot tea at the lodge. He should smell the air in the fall, in Nova Scotia. Earthy and salty and sweet-smokey.

I’d like to bring Osama to the Hubbards Market, show him my son bopping to the fiddles. I’d like to bring him to the Lunenburg Folk Music Festival, give him a greasy bag of fish & chips, stomp and cheer for the finale under the mainstage tent. Fill them and their like up to the brim despite themselves. Bombard them with hospitality and beauty in ordinariness.

Likewise, I’d like to send George W. off on an indefinite tree-planting stint in Northern Ontario. Hard work and a mouthful of blackflies to wipe that smug, shit-eating grin off his face. Then I’d turn American so I could vote for Barack Obama. Right after I get my first tan and win a million bucks and figure out how to time-travel.

Fellow infidels: what would you do with Mortal Enemy, given a weekend to make good?

Lord, I love the dig. And I’m not the only one.

I have a method, an approach plan. Toss all the pinks aside; watch for interesting fabric. It’s usually attached to the holy grail: the Good Label. Eureka! A teeny-tiny kung-fu outfit. A suede cowboy vest with a fringe. Endless 70s-era t-shirts. A handmade puffy cordouroy jacket. Retro toques with giant pom-poms. And bottomless Gap, Old Navy, Stride-rite, exotic European brands, all givens, some never worn, topping out at about a buck apiece.

Frenchy’s is a maritime phenomenon, well-loved and documented. There’s at least one in almost every small rural town—Bridgewater is enormous, the Coldbrook twins own Halloween, Windsor is hot and cold, Sackville is a hidden gem. We’re excursionists. We take an afternoon and hit half a dozen, once every few months (station wagon required).

People elsewhere think they know secondhand, but they don’t. Not until they know Frenchy’s—and score the kind of haul that gets taken home in a garbage bag, bursting at the seams.

I am a treasure-hunter, the third generation of Robson women who troll the bins. Still squeamish? Behold the prize of vintage plaid and shearling.

 

In late 1760, an island homestead in the middle of Mahone Bay was attacked. The family were wealthy Huguenots – French Protestants not welcomed by either side. Micmac Indians scalped the father and kidnapped his pregnant wife and three small children, trekking them on a forced epic overland to Quebec City where they were sold as a prize to the French.

They were my people, I’m told. One of hundreds of twists of fate either cruel and deliberate or random and blessed that conspired to spit me into the world in 1973.

In 1755, Andreas and Philip, German brothers newly arrived in Lunenburg, heard tales of cattle abandoned and ripe for the taking in the wake of the Acadian expulsion. They up and bushwhacked across the province to Grand-Pré to rescue (or salvage, or steal, depending on your perspective) as many cows as they could. There and back again, racing to beat the winter, the journey took them more than three months. They were here, in Lunenburg, huffing up the steep lanes from the fishing fleets to the churches at the top of the hill. Past the very same bumps and stoops and housefronts that flank our favourite haunts 250 years later.

The lives of our fore-folk are often hollywood-grade, all romance and heroism and double-crossing and tragedy. Such is the case for all of us, if you look (my friend Michael’s great-great-grandfather was a notorious Jamaican pirate, honest-to-god). Even the ordinary ones are magical: the Truro photographer who took such affectionate portraits of his lovely wife in the 1920s. Newton Sponagle, the late-1800s sea captain who sailed the world with his battered wooden chest. It now holds our Halloween costumes, his name hand-etched on the inside.

There was John Robson, my Grampa Joe’s father, posted to lead the honour guard of England’s King Edward VIII during WWII. Tricky Eddie, not only suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer but having abdicated his throne for an American divorcee, was industriously packed off to Bermuda where a Canadian contingent helped him run his conveniently distant governorship. A blessing? Perhaps. John was out of the melee, but far from his beloved wife Katherine.

A few months ago their wartime letters miraculously found their way to us, full of love. How he missed her, their children. Don’t let them get you dearest, he wrote cheerfully. Keep little Don by the scruff of his neck (hey! that’s my Grampa) if he gets rowdy.

What will someone find of us, tucked in an attic?

Family trees are never real, never evocative. Not like holding the artifacts of a life in your hand, crumbly or fragile or mossy as they are. Like finding a packet of forgotten love letters embalmed in a moldy purse, stuck in the rafters of a stranger’s horse barn. This is when your history brushes up against you, seeps through your skin like a ghost that leaves finger smudges. I was here. I was alive. I struggled and fought and risked. Loved and birthed and laughed and protected, just like you. This was mine: this, right here. This thing, this place.

Thick with many generations of Nova Scotians on one side, longtime New Brunswickers on the other. No wonder Evan likes the taste of seawater.

There’s a dead house next door. Evan and I walk to the beach to feed the winter ducks, and we pass it on the way. It sits forgotten, friendless and mournful. The paint has faded and cracked to match the salt-soaked wood, and the remnants of a fanciful trim along the eaves are long past irrelevant. Every window is broken, and through the shards and gloom I can see wallpaper inside, pinstripes and rosebuds.

 

I stand in front of it, stepping closer, trespassing. Waiting for it to wake up and explain itself. People were born in there; people died in there. How can a house stand through a hundred and fifty years of hurricanes and nor’easters only to wither away, alone? It stares back at me and sighs. I don’t know, it says.

Houses like this are scattered throughout the south shore of Nova Scotia. And fishing boats, too: beached and left to rot, hollow and exposed. A study of peace in abandonment. There’s one just down the road, keeled over on a strip of sand. I hope no one ever takes it away.

Evan’s getting antsy. It’s time to go. Why are we stopped? He wonders. It’s just a falling-down old house.

As the Lunenburg fisheries memorial attests, 1927 was a very bad year.

Last weekend Evan and I stood on the docks scanning the list of names carved into rock, wondering what storms or bad luck prevented those fathers and brothers and sons from returning to port.

Entire familes of men, two and three generations lost in the same night. Mack, Owen, Ronald and Warren Knickle. Edward and William Maxner. Guy, Mars and Raymond Selig. Elvin, George, Wilfred and Irving Tanner. James, Samuel and Samuel Warren. Burns, Bradford, Gordon and Raymond Williams.

What happened out there? Did they get any comfort from being in it together, or did witnessing each other make it worse?

I don’t love Justin any more now than I did before. But having a baby with him turns that love into something more tangible.

He is working for the Coast Guard right now for two weeks, and halfway through his time away I know he’s already desperately Evan-sick. Sick enough for the self-declared computer-phobe to park himself in front of the desktop at the station and explore the ‘inter-web’ in search of new pictures of his boy, hoping none of the other crewmen hear him snuffling with pride.

And we miss him too. We have so much to show him when he gets home. New tricksies and cowlicks and giggles and chompers and num-nums.

On the Lunenburg docks, I couldn’t help thinking of all the women who got bad news during that terrible season, their treasured men and boys taken by the sea. It would have made me sad before, in a passing sort of way.

Now, it makes my heart stop to think of it.

When you grow up in Halifax, you grow up knowing what 200-year-old gunpowder smells like.

You poke at beached jellyfish by the half-buried shipwreck on McNab’s Island, in the shadow of the point where they used to hang pirates as a warning at the harbour mouth. Your elementary school’s hot dog picnics are at fort ruins, where you scramble and screech victoriously atop shiny, blackened cannons.

This is my Grampa Joe.

 

Seaworthy, salty, impossibly clever. All the things a maritime grampa should be. He’s sick right now, so we bring Evan to jump on his bed and spit up on his floor and grab his glasses off his face and give him kisses and hopefully bring a few smiles.

Grampa had a boat called Pygargus who lived at the Armdale Yacht Club, an island of mortar and rock that was once a jail. When I was a girl I used to wander through the old prison, fascinated by the stone walls and iron gates, cells now filled with coils of rope and sails in heaps.

Armdale was the best place to go junk fishing. Grampa Joe attached a giant magnet to the end of a rope and every time we went sailing, Andrew and I would crabwalk along the edges of the piers, jigging for junk.

We’d land all kind of fabulous things. Rusty old nails, bits of wire, coins. Sometimes the magnet would get caught on the pier cables and I’d tug and tug, hoping I’d snagged an old treasure chest. A treasure chest would be too heavy for a regular-grade junk fishing tackle, so who would expect I’d actually land it? Just tugging on it was exciting enough.

I can’t wait to be alongside Evan as he discovers his own junk and treasure. Will he find any at Martello Tower? Or in the waves of Shediac Bay? Perhaps under the watchful eye of his own Grampa Joe? I hope so.

Happy five-month birthday, kiddo.