Remembering Sydney Nova Scotia

Lying in bed this morning suddenly overcome with the unwelcome dark of the approaching winter months at six, clearly at six in Florida, I cast my mind back to sunnier memories, not even later in the day, hence the sun closer to the arctic circle in Nova Scotia.  Sydney is a small town with a demonstrable downtown of shops, especially agreeable to me who grew up eighty years ago walking the streets of such a town holding on to my mother's hand, darting into one storefront after another, always being greeted by my first name.  The grotesque strip malls of Florida well, half of America, are unknown here, downtown life is not lived in parking lots driving to stores that are ten feet from one another.  Sydney's mode of shopping encourages intimacy, people on the street say hello, there isn't that steel reserve of meeting where men are all carrying loaded guns.  Makes you realize how unfriendly and isolated Americans are.  And there is abundant chance to meet and greet on the streets of Sydney; people are all out walking also obviously for their exercise, they have the practice of a gym routine when they get down onto the boardwalk that fronts the water, a body of water that is a large divide, a lake as it were for the community.   Folks are walking on the boardwalk all day,, what is more, middle aged, fully constructed and padded older couples march along vigorously hand in hand as they have been doing since they dated in high school.  Charming!  My imagination, of course, wishing to endow the people of Sydney with all things sweet.  Sydney, land of enchantment..  And an extraordinary Lebanese restaurant with truly authentic cuisine is just above the boardwalk.  The proprietor are two young men of such stunning physical beauty as to make my daughters and me gasp.  Ah, the men of the Near East!  My grandson in law tells me that the Lebanese not French speakers as you might expect constitute the second largest ethnic class after the Anglophones in Nova Scotia.  There are charming early twentieth century houses sitting looking out onto the bay, newly restored, their hardwood floors gleaming, the old wooden door frames glistening with polish, new kitchens, and so on and so forth.  One of my daughters and I were momentarily aroused by my son to buy a house for sale and thus have a large family home where we could all visit in the summer.  I guess the new baby was a psychological draw, our hearts jumped but then stopped and lay still when we thought of the winter and draining the pipes, and the furnace going off, real life intruded.