This Earth.

I have something to say but I can’t quite gather it in my hand. Was it something about the woodpecker, drumming out his hopeful song? Or wanting to be brave enough to stretch the limits of my comfort zone? Or the lady the red mare and I came across in the woods and how she told me she had been born in Glasgow and how I wished afterwards that I had asked her how she had ended up all the way across the country. (There is a very great difference in Scotland between the east and the west.)

I’m not sure it was those things.

Perhaps it was something about words and how much I love them and how I will fight for them. (And how grand that sounds, when in reality it just means I get a bit stompy and shirty.)

I had a sudden vision, just now, of a wide, sunny room in Athens, because my sister and brother-in-law are going to Greece and I have been wondering about not seeing the Parthenon before I die. I have grown to loathe travelling and I can take one holiday every two or three years and each one is precious and I’d much rather hop on a ferry and go to a dear Scottish island than wrestle and wrangle through crowded and angry airports. But when the relations spoke last night of their adventure to Greece and how they are going to get on boats and go for lunch on some distant shore, I did have a momentary pang of envy.

I remember those sunny rooms. I used to know them well. And I knew the boats which went to the islands, and I remember how the food always tasted more thrilling, because of the salt of the sea and the tang in the air.

But I got to have a home which is filled with idiotic beauty. These hills are my home and these woods and forests and mountains and glens and burns and these roaring, mighty rivers which rush down to the sea. There will be no holiday this year but I’m already thinking of dashing day trips - to Ullapool perhaps, or Arran, or Skye, or Glencoe. I want to go to the sand dunes of Fyvie and the little painted houses of Pennan.

I want, most of all, to know that I am home. That is my greatest luxury. To have my roots deep in this Scottish earth. Home ended when I was seven and after that it was moving and moving and moving and not quite knowing where we would end up and we were always at the mercy of someone’s whim and some of it was delightful and quite an adventure and some of it was just tiring and sad. So I dig my roots deep now, and I feel the good fortune of that, and perhaps that was what I wanted to write about, after all.

This earth, where I stand. I don’t know quite how I ended up here, but I am giddily, streamingly glad that I did.