I was unprepared for the beauty of a June day on the La Have islands: old homesteads surrounded with perennials: daffodils waving bravely in a fierce wind; narcissus decorating stone outcroppings and perfuming the air; blooming lilacs drawing in as much of the surrounding land as they could manage in a year and so slowly eating up the paths and fields around them; wood trails carpeted with four petaled bunch berry, the white petals morphing into red berries by winter. I was unprepared for just about everything that first summer in Nova Scotia. The previous summer we had traveled by VW bus like a mess of itinerant gypsies to stay in my sister’s house on Bell Island. I had two small children, my English mother-in-law and an increasingly difficult case of morning sickness; Simon had a broken wrist and his arm in a cast but managed, nonetheless, to put the small sailboat we were trailing behind the bus into the water and sail off (literally) single-handed to explore the islands