“I’d never felt rooted nor a sense of being home until I put down stakes, literally and figuratively, at St. Peters Harbour on P.E.I.’s northeast shore,” writes Barbara Palmer Rousseau in her exquisite little book Finding Home at the Harbour, a love song to her spiritual home, the wild creatures and landscapes and history that surround her. Rousseau, a master’s student in Island studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, came to the province from Ontario and built a cottage where she and her husband Peter spend about six months each year. The book is a culmination, she says, of her undergraduate work and various courses, plus her wonderment at the natural world in general and of islands in particular.

The ocean, life on an island, and her strong connection to waterways, “have always been there for me,” Rousseau says. Even though hailing from Ontario and away from the Atlantic Ocean, she grew up between the Niagara River and the Welland Canal, between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and always liked to cycle along the river in Ottawa when she lived there. She and her husband moved to their cottage three months into the COVID pandemic in 2020, where she continued her studies in a bachelor of integrated studies, with a focus on environmental history. It was natural, once on the island and seduced by its natural wonders, to continue into the next degree and study the protective action of the restless dunes for her master’s thesis.

That fascination for place, for nature and environment and wildlife, comes through in Rousseau’s book. There are chapters on the endearing foxes, the provincial animal of the Island, on the birds and their songs, on the restless dunes, on the spruce trees that “squat, skirls in hand,” as she quotes in the words of Island poet Milton Acorn.

You don’t have to be from an island, any island, to love this book. You don’t have to be a cottager, even, although Rousseau recounts her love of just being at the shore, watching and listening. She wrote a substantial amount of the book at the cottage, returning to the winter home she had in Charlottetown to edit. She and her husband have since sold the house and returned to Ontario for the winters, to be closer to their adult children.

Rousseau says she wrote from April until the book was accepted at the end of October 2023, adding, “I was pulling a lot of stuff I had carried in my head for a long time, and was looking for something to tie it together. Other writers came in to help me focus and give the book a thread of islandness.”

Among of the most delightful aspects of Finding Home at the Harbour are the images, done by Rousseau in acrylics, watercolour washes, and pen drawings, of life at St. Peters Harbour. Not the life of humans, but of birds and foxes, wildflowers and waves, the lighthouse and other scenic glimpses of the world around her.

Asked what the central message of her book is, Rousseau muses, “Maybe it’s that the more you learn about a place and its residents (human and otherwise), the more you feel at home.”