editor’s
LETTER PHOTO BY NORTHOVER PHOTOGRAPHY
SHINE ON
B
efore I sit down to write my editor’s note, I like to wait for the most up-to-date version of the magazine layout just before it goes to press. While I see the pages develop along the way, it’s the big reveal at the end when my graphic designer Barbara sends through the last PDF that I can see all of the stories, photos, and ads coalesce. I love the energy and the sentiment
The North Shore
that resonates from each one of our carefully designed pages, and it’s usually in these moments that something gives me a nudge to say it’s time to get writing. This morning as I return to this practice, I am sitting in my living room. Outside my window, a blue jay lands on a naked branch of my cherry tree, its weight briefly waving it up and down as if to say hello. It’s a grey morning and the forecast calls for showers for most of the day. It’s a pretty typical late-November day. But as I flip through the pages and give the copy another quick read, I turn to the ad on the inside back cover and the words at the top of the page remind me that today is not a typical November day nor have any of the other days since the calendar turned last year. “History never looks like history when you are living through it.” The words of William Dawson, a thought leader born in Pictou 200 years ago and being celebrated by the McCulloch House Museum and Genealogy Centre. Outside of the early days of the pandemic last spring, when the world felt like it was spinning on a different axis, most of us have just kept our chins up, took a few punches, and did our best to live our lives as we always have. As we wrap up the last issue of At Home on the North Shore in 2020, and I think back on our year and the enormity of our collective experiences, I can’t help but wonder how the historians of the future will look back at this time and how it will be viewed. I believe that when they dust off the volumes that tell the story of Nova Scotia’s response to the global pandemic, they will discover the finest example of how to live beautifully and compassionately in turbulent times. They will read chapters on our resolve to protect our communities from a virus that was out of control in other parts of the world, and global-health specialists will speak about how
ah! Winter 2020–21 - 6
