Sweet life on Canada's South Shore

Nova Scotia's cabins, their facades silvered by the Atlantic Ocean's salty air, are built to last

- Laura Ng

NOVA SCOTIA, Canada - I knew it would be fun to go to rural Canada on a whim and stay with a stranger who built her own cabin on a farm, but I did not know I would be stepping into a quiet paradise.

On my first night in the effortlessly chic city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, I met Bryanna. She invited me to her home, which she had built on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, a stretch of land that curves around Canada's rugged eastern coastline.

Her cabin sits on the Spring Tides farm, run by two sisters who are her friends. The cabin is a character unto itself: beautifully raw, 378 sq ft of cosy lived-in-ness, perfect in its quirks.

I grow to know the cabin the way I would a friend - starting with its main traits, like no running water or electric heat; the outhouse a few steps away from the cabin; a friend's painting on the wall.

But there is also the smaller, quirkier stuff you discover only by spending time together. How the kitchen tap makes a loud, grating noise when the water tank runs low. How, when the night is quiet, you hear deer rustling through the trees behind the cabin. The grain of hemlock ceilings, drawing patterns.

This is a home lived in throughout the year, with a water tank that runs low in dry summers and a fireplace that warms the cabin in the winters.

We bathe in rivers and oceans, forage for hedgehog mushrooms in the woods out back, and make pasta with the squashes and cucumbers we pick fresh from her vegetable plot.

The two of us build a small woodshed over three days, sketching out rough blueprints, picking up planks from the nearby woodmill and shopping at Home Hardware for storm brackets.

A LIFE ASSEMBLED The people I meet are not only boat builders, but also writers; full-time farmers, part-time academics; the owner of a general store, also a social worker for addiction.