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July/August 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Moose mystery Feature: Century club Feature: Honey Ranchers The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Sooner or later, it’s coming for all of us: that moment when we’re finally too old to look after ourselves. When it arrives, let’s hope there’s a vacancy at Villa St. Josephdu-Lac, in tiny Dayton, N.S. It’s not just the woods-and-waterfront setting, the saintly staffers who run the seniors’ home or the luxury-hotel feel, with nine-metre ceilings, a mammoth stone fireplace and oak floors. It’s the thought that if we live there, we might, in our dotage, have it as together as Fidelis Cameron, sitting straightbacked in her wheelchair, silver hair perfectly coiffed, clothes and jewellery immaculate.

As the noon sun pours through the cathedral windows, her eyes dance as she steers the conversation smoothly from growing up in the fishing community of Pubnico to her life as a dentist’s wife and homemaker in the Annapolis Valley and the past 12 years she’s lived at the Villa. Cameron talks about the books she’s been reading — "oh, nothing too heavy" — attending Catholic Mass and playing Sunday afternoon concerts in the lobby. When a visitor says it looks like the perfect venue for listening to music, she smiles conspiratorially and replies, "Oh, it is. Would you like to hear me play?" And then, moments later, she’s at the piano stool, foot bouncing to the rhythm as the old early-20th-century standards — "Baby Face," "Smile Awhile" and "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey" — float perfectly off her manicured fingertips.

This, it turns out, is what age 101 looks like. At least here, on the southwest tip of Nova Scotia, one of the best places in the world to live if you aspire to reach the mythical century mark. In truth, the province’s centenarian rate — around 165 in its population of 932,400 — is only about half of what it is on the Japanese island of Okinawa, the true land of Methuselah. But calling Nova Scotia home means you are 1.5 times more likely to hit 100 than Canadians as a whole, and nine times more likely than the average citizen of the planet. Furthermore, thanks to medical advances, hitting 100 isn’t the big deal it once was. The number of Canadian centenarians climbed by 21 percent between 1996 and 2001 and is expected to increase significantly by 2050. Yet even in the midst of this demographic trend, Nova Scotia is a veritable Shangri-La.

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