How a 112-year-old house on a hill has offered good bones, good views and good sanctuary.

When the men working on my family's summer home ripped the back off the old house in order to extend the living room, they discovered the original wood planks underneath the clapboard. Little strips of crispy yellow newspaper-the Family Herald-clung to the cracks and nails in the wall. "They were going to drywall," recalls my mother. "I took one look at it and said, 'Leave the boards like that.'"

One dried bit of newsprint had a date printed on it: 1896. This gave her a rough idea when the house was built on a small hill on Pugwash Point, NS. She left the pieces of newspaper on the wall and began adding her own things: square nails found while digging the new foundation; a painting of the house done after she and my father bought it in 1995; wildflowers painted on a piece of barnboard; the ragged round piano seat cover with the schooner stitched onto it that she'd sat on as a child.

"This is our memory wall," she announced during tours after the renovations were completed. Four years later, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's develops over many years; the symptoms-the earliest being short-term memory loss-emerging gradually. It's likely my father's brain was beginning to create the plaques and tangles that would eventually erode his mind when I got married in 1996. This means that in 1998, when the renovations began on the old house-including moving it farther up the hill onto a full concrete basement-my father was experiencing the little blips of memory loss that in time would steal away the deepest, most innate knowledge each of us possesses.

This old house came into our family with a purpose: to give us new memories.

My family came from Cobourg, Ont, to the small village of Pugwash in August 1979, after our minister, Garth Mundle, invited us to visit him where he was born and raised. We met his brother Eldon who ran the family dairy farm on Pugwash Point and that first vacation created a lifelong friendship. Somehow Eldon and his wife, Janice, always found us a place to stay on the Point but by the early '90s, my parents, now empty nesters, felt they'd impinged on the Mundles' hospitality long enough.

"Your father said, 'We either buy our own place or we stop coming,'" Mum remembers. That's when they thought of the old Seaman place, owned by Andrew and Maggie Seaman in the early 1900s. Eldon's grandfather, who purchased the farm next to the Seamans' in 1918, later bought the 32-acre Seaman property after Andrew's death, in 1924, and then severed off the eighth of an acre that contains the house.

The house of many memories.

Some of the seven Mundle boys (including Eldon's father) lived in the house with their new brides; in 1945 it was sold to a couple from Truro who used it as a summer home. Long after that, it was a boarding house until Roy and Phyllis Nelson bought it in 1976.

Phyllis remembers that the clapboard was painted robin's egg blue and from the road, she says, the house looked like a dump.  "We went to see it anyway and I said, 'Roy, I want this place.' I just loved it. I could look out any window and see water. It was a great place for our seven grandchildren... There are an awful lot of wonderful memories."

When my marriage ended, I was in Vancouver; my first and only plan was to go to Pugwash-in my memory it was a safe place associated with love, laughter and freedom. It was a place I hadn't visited in more than 10 years. I arrived there in spring 2002 with a car full of books and clothes, a dog and a lot of painful memories.

It marked another major change in my life: I would remain at home to help care for my father. This made it possible for my parents to continue spending five months of the year there, at their summer home. It didn't take me long to realize that while it wasn't going to be easy, I would get to spend a good chunk of my father's last few lucid years with him in the place he loved best.

What I remember most is late afternoon. In August, when the weather is sunny and warm, the sun floats above the harbour and the ripples in the water appear like a million diamonds sparkling on the surface. Dad and I would sit on the front porch in the hot afternoon sun and drink a beer each. It was one of those routine activities you try to keep doing for a person with Alzheimer's but it ends up becoming one of your own special memories. Even during that last difficult summer together there, in 2005, when in the late afternoons, Dad suddenly wouldn't remember where he was or who we were, when he would walk down to the farm to tell Janice and Eldon that "the woman in that house is trying to steal my money," I would still try to get him to sit outside on the porch with me.

That summer was the most poignant: it was when Dad announced, "This isn't my house."

On Father's Day, he decided he'd walk home to Ontario; to Fenella, in particular, the hamlet where he grew up, the place Pugwash reminded him of. "He doesn't remember this place," my mother said. This wasn't easy for her to admit. It meant he wouldn't be coming back.

The late playwright Timothy Findley wrote that memory is a form of hope. How do you find hope in a memory house? It comes from the cozy outer kitchen where we gathered on the couch as Mum cooked supper in the pantry kitchen. It comes from the game of Scrabble my mother and I played every evening as Dad watched TV or, in the more demanding years, after he went to bed. Hope comes from the gardens we planted each summer. It comes from the friends who watched out their windows as Dad walked by every morning with his dog, and continued to watch when those walks became emotional escapes from a world he no longer understood.

I remember my first kiss. It happened in Eldon Mundle's horse barn when I was 12 years old. Twenty-four summers later, I agreed to a blind date. When this man kissed me for the first time, we were standing on the front porch of the old Seaman place, our place, and the stars were sparkling like diamonds in the dark Nova Scotia sky.

We were married last July, outside on the porch. There have been brides here before but perhaps a wedding at this house is a new memory. Our day was hot and sunny; some of the guests found shade under Maggie Seaman's old lilac trees. My three-year-old nephew George, who looks so much like his grandfather, sat on my brother-in-law's shoulders. The cat meowed from the upstairs window that will always be my father's bedroom.

Memories of my father, who now lives in a nursing home in Ontario, permeated every moment of this day-when I received a second chance at marriage and began a new life in the region he loved so much. There was a strong sense of letting go.

The painting that hangs on the memory wall inside shows the house as it looked before it was renovated, after my mother painted it blueberry blue. Yet it's still the same house that was built in 1896. Timothy Findley also wrote that memory is survival. This house has survived its various inhabitants and their renovations for more than 110 years. Every person is a memory that lingers, like bits of newspaper clinging to a wooden plank.

And the house waits on the top of the hill yet, ready to welcome the next person seeking love, laughter-and hope.