She’d first visited the house up the isolated glen in Sutherland when she was a child. Then, in March more than two and a half years ago, she came back to decide what to do with the place she’d inherited from her grandmother. March was still winter in these parts—with snow on the hills, and the burns and rivers veins of roiling liquid peat, it was beyond dreary, it was dreich.
She smiles to herself as she pronounces the Scottish word, “dreich,” with a rolled “r” and a strong “ch” at the end. None of my southern colleagues could ever say that sound; “k” was how they pronounced it when they attempted a Scottish accent.
She remembers stumbling the last mile into an Atlantic wind funneled by the steep sides of the glen, towards the farmhouse now invisible in the thick mist, a mist that became fine rain, penetrating her coat and hat, through to her woolen jumper and slacks. I almost turned back, the track so deep in mud. And with so many potholes I didn’t dare risk the car. The aftermath of the visit had been a horrid sneezing coughing sniveling cold that took weeks to shake.
At first she’d thought the house had remained unchanged since the last time she’d come up this glen, as a twelve-year-old about to be sent to boarding school.
Close up, not so. The neglect was clear. Windows, two either side of the door, and the dormer windows set in the iridescent grey-blue Ballahulish-slate roof, hadn’t been painted since who-knew-when. The door also. Instead of its former cheery blue, it was now blistered and streaked and bleached out by gales and hoar frost and hailstones. Both chimneys were jackdaw’s nests of vegetation. Weeds and wildflowers sprouted from the gutters.
Then a shaft of sun breaking over the hills, over the trees, over the heather, the mist lifting, spotlighted the house.
That sunbeam changed my mind. She smiles at the recollection. And dreams, dreams of comfort and safety in the house in the glen where the buildings nestled into a fold in the faultline, those dreams sustained me in the bleakest of times, times of danger, of fear, of a relentless low-level dread of being discovered.
That day, D-day—decision day—when the sun persuaded me to reconsider, in the near distance, a skylark rose from the heather. I can hear it as if it were yesterday. Singing its heart out, that tiny bird is my talisman, my link to those long-ago long summer days when true night was a scant three hours of deep twilight.
The winter nights— they last till mid-morning, returning in the early afternoon, but they’re enchanting nonetheless. Fires blazing, scones baking, curled up in the window seat reading Kidnapped, I can live that life again.
She hugs herself. Then the cloud returns and covers the sun. She smiles as she remembers her initial reaction to the move back to her ancestral land. What are you thinking of? Are you insane?
Four months later, the renovations began. Three months after that, in the beginnings of a long winter, I moved in.
It was a mad decision, she reminds herself, but happy mad.