A Family Place: A Man Returns to the Center of His Life

They believed they were simply buying a remote getaway spot, but within a few months a more complex dream for the property developed. Enlisting their children and their daughter’s carpenter boyfriend, they decided to build a cabin on the land the following summer, to build it with their own hands, as a family venture.A Family Place gracefully mixes a narrative of that summer’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking events with passages of the family’s history that show its members as real people and dramatize what is at stake for each of them in Nova Scotia. And he tracks the mood of his family through the long, difficult summer, from initial enthusiasm to near mutiny, and finally to exhilaration and deep satisfaction at having built something that will last, having rebuilt a family in the process.. Gaines describes the process of building a cabin while living in tents without electricity or running water, and the pleasures and limitations of a life so simplified that a week’s biggest social event is a bonfire. In the summer of 1990, writer Charles Gaines and his artist wife, Patricia, bought 160 acres of wild land on the northeast coast of Nova Scotia. He draws a deft portrait of

. He serves as US director of the Atlantic Salmon Federation and is a founder and lifetime board member of the US Fly Fishing Team. DiBenedetto lives in Charleston, South Carolina. He is also the author of On the Run: An Angler’s Journey down the Striper Coast. Alexander Bridge is a writer and journalist, whose work has appeared in the Montreal Star, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Boston Globe, among others. Dave DiBenedetto is the senior vice president and editor-in-chief of Garden & Gun magazine. He lives in Boylston, Nova Scotia. About the AuthorCharles Gaines
Dave DiBenedetto is the senior vice president and editor-in-chief of Garden & Gun magazine. DiBenedetto lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Alexander Bridge is a writer and journalist, whose work has appeared in the Montreal Star, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Boston Globe, among others. He lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, a