Where I create

Story by Jan Fancy Hull 
Contributed photos
I’ve owned a few acres on a small lake in Lunenburg County for almost thirty years. For the first fifteen it was a handy get-away from work. I lived in Mahone Bay then, a beautiful destination. But that’s the beauty of living here: a cottage is affordable and only twenty minutes away.
Back then, I had torn a page from a magazine and tacked it inside the privy. The photo was of a lake scene very similar to mine, and the caption said “Someday, all days will be Saturday.”
Oh, yes please.
Today, my log chalet has two indoor toilets, internet via satellite, and a deck bigger than the little hut I began with. I live here now. Every day is Saturday.
​Mind you, I work hard, though they say that if you do what you love you never work a day. Two things I love to work at are creating stone sculptures and writing.
The way I do it, stone carving is dirty and noisy. I use angle-grinders with diamond-imbedded blades to cut and shape the stone. This creates dramatic clouds of dust. Fortunately, the trees between me and my one neighbour absorb the noise and the dust. My air compressor makes a racket  so I wear hearing protection, but it’s amazing how sound is muffled by a field of alders and Sweet William. With all that dust, I must carve outdoors, so it’s my fine-weather pursuit.
Writing is mostly done indoors, and is especially suited for bad weather - the worse the better for me. I have no excuse not to write; I just have to be patient sometimes, waiting for a storm. I have learned to love this solitude. 
Even when you’re at your getaway, there can be one more place to escape to: on the calm water of a quiet lake. I kayaked this lake for years, but since I acquired a ten-foot plastic boat and equipped it with a silent electric motor, I haven’t looked back. Mostly I d rift, often with a thermos of coffee roasted in Lunenburg. I watch fish swim under my boat, enjoy loons diving and calling, hear faraway children swimming, and think. If I have a writerly task like editing to do, it’s not work when I do it on the water. 
​This life twenty minutes from town 
is productive: my first book, Where’s Home? was published in August 2020, and my poems will be published in an anthology this fall. My sculptures have been exhibited in art shows and galleries, and my Heart Loves Mahone Bay sculpture is on permanent display on the Mahone Bay waterfront.
Getting away in Lunenburg County has given me what I needed to get out there.