A Message from Mackeigan Road
By Sher Maryn LeBay Author’s note: I fell in love with Cape Breton: its people, its forests of conifers and maple and white birch, the sea close by. There is a kindness here I have not experienced elsewhere and people are very easy to know. They let you in. There are also deep strands […]
America: We Have Been Asleep for Too Long
By Sher Maryn LeBay America, we have been asleep for far too long. We turned away from the things that did not concern us (although they really should have). We explained this by saying there was nothing we could do… About the fact we jail one out of every 110 adult Americans, that there are […]
Awakening to a New World on the 9th of November, 2016
By Sher Maryn LeBay A mural in a barrio of South Tucson a few miles from my home. The city is very poor with many people of Mexican descent. In a dark time, we must turn toward the light. We must decide who we are. Many Americans were forsaken tonight. Silence is an option, not […]
The Boy Was Born To Fish: A Life By the Sea in Neil’s Harbour, Cape Breton
By Sher Maryn LeBay The boy was born in “Great Noise,” a remote fishing village of a hundred families carved into a hill and sliced open by a nosedive of freshwater into the mouth of the sea. He came up there, too. It was a couple of years after the end of the Great War, […]
Election Day, United States of America
The United States of America: Calling on the Better Angels on 8 November 2016…No matter who wins tonight, the dark night of our national soul is now fully underway. May the Spirit of all that is good show us the way to becoming one world… About the photo: I took this shot of a house […]
Cape Breton and a Tale of Two Bears
Do you know the poem about the two bears? I will embellish it… Two bears, in the wild, spend an exquisite day doing what bears do—plunging their large paws into a cold stream where the salmon run. They don’t talk much when the fishing is good and today there is very little conversation. All morning […]
The Love of Lobster
When I was a little girl growing up in Connecticut, I would have been very happy if lobster had been designated as an essential food group. Every birthday I wanted just one thing: a 2 lb. lobster all my own. One birthday stands out among many others. I was five or six and my parents […]
A Day in the Gabarus Wilderness
The green door of the Gabarus Wilderness is a portal into a world of enchantment bound by the sea. There are lakes and ponds, barrens and hillocks, leafy trees and needled ones…but first you must find it. Canadians, it seems to me, favor the oral tradition when it comes to signs and directions; I have […]
An Open Letter to a Canadian Boy
Dear Anthony, The other day, I went over to your grandmother Anna’s house in Point Edward to learn how to make oatcakes and biscuits. I am an American and I never heard of oatcakes before. Your grandmother saw one of my stories in the paper and invited me over to taste some. Your grandfather kept […]
Capelin Time
Their lives are short: three years, maybe four. And they spend them in the coldest of waters, moving as a single glimmering sheet under the edge of an ice shelf where plankton thrive. The capelin, barely as long as a silver spoon, form a living bridge between the the tiny organisms of the Deep and […]