Words From The West

The door opens onto a farmyard. Hens roam by the door, waiting for food. The yard is muddy, marked by the turning circle of my car. In front of the barn is the big house, the old white house with black painted frames, one of those Arran houses that sits in my imagination, waiting for me.

There are purple crocuses, palely coming into bloom, in the centre of the yard.

The lane leads down to to the road. It’s bumpy, pocked, muddy. Water pours in from a leaking culvert. John is proud of the state of his lane.

I meet him walking back. Collecting his post from a hand-made post box, a bucket with a half fitting lid.

There are daffodils by the side of the lane. Some are just starting to bud. Some are in full bloom. It’s impossible to walk past the daffodils without the hope of a poem bursting inside you. Even if you don’t want it to.

The lane leads down past an old house, half in ruin, the for sale sign crossed out with a sold. It sits almost at the corner of the lane, where the track meets the road. I call it the main road, but it’s just the road that runs round Arran really. It’s busy when the boat comes in, a stream of traffic filing their way to their home, their end point on the island.

I turn left at the end of the lane, over the bridge. The river is running full. The wind is blowing in the trees, wintry brown in the woods, it’s misty today, but there’s still colour in the wood.

I cross the road to Sliddery and walk into town.

The road goes past a wood, the grounds I think of a big house you can just see in the distance. The trees swing in the wind and it looks like a place you’d want to play in as a child. As I walk past the trees something catches my eye: pink blossom on the branches of a bare tree. I look up through the grey branches to a totally grey sky and the blossom smiles.

On the way back a man stops me to point through the trees. “A heron” he says. I can’t see it, though he keeps on pointing. He’s disappointed in my response. “Well I think it’s amazing, it’s amazing to me”. This is enough to give my eyes focus and I see the bird, not one, but four birds sitting quietly in the scrub beyond the trees. Just sitting, or waiting, or thinking or having a heron parley.

I walk past Murray Place. I’ve done this walk many times, repeating this cycle over and over, coming to Arran, coming to Lamlash, looking, wanting, unable to move past the paralysis of the dream. And that knowledge carries with me as I walk, dampening my spirits as I look at the hill behind the houses – it’s not much of a hill but it’s shape is just perfect, it always make me smile – and the Holy Isle, sitting, waiting, as it always does. It’s good to know that Holy Isle will always be there.

I cross over and walk by the shore. There’s a wading bird there, a curlew perhaps, it has an impossibly long beak. The bird looks silly, comical, to my untrained city eye, and yet at the same time it is so perfect, so perfectly designed, so right for its purpose, that my eyes fill with tears at the unutterable wonder of the whole thing.

The wonder of evolution, of adaptation, and the wonder of the knowledge that all of this, somehow, was thrown into being by some essential, elemental, universal force.

It’s misty on the way out, wild and wet when I turn back for home. The weather doesn’t trouble me. I like it. I like the feel of the wind on my cheeks and the highland rain on my face. It reminds me of the person I was when I was small. Because I remember that feeling of walking on the moor with my grandmother with the wind in my hair and the cold rain on my cheeks, walking to cut the peats.

Oh it’s not rain as such it’s rain in the wind, it’s mist that makes you wet, it leaves you wet and cold but laughing too. The wind batters when I turn and I think about wind in the city, the way we scurry to get indoors, the dirt that blows around, the bins that uproot. I don’t walk in the town when it’s windy.

I’ll walk here. Walk out and talk with god, watch the waves, listen to the cry of the oystercatcher.

Know that I’m home.