Saying goodbye...soon...

Time is running out in Scotland. I have two twenty page papers and one presentation due by next Tuesday. The infamous May Ball is next week, run by the Kate Kennedy club which is peopled by the finest of the fine St. Andrews aristocratic young gentlemen. The May Dip is this Sunday, which will see loads of scantily clad St. Andrews students run into the freezing North Sea at dawn - myself included. I've been working at Rufflets Country House like a madwoman. Well I can't really waitress like a madwoman, so that statement is made only in reference to the astounding amount of shifts I've been working. However, that does mean that I've decided to travel France, Italy, Greece and Turkey for the entire month of June as opposed to just a few weeks, since I've been making more money than I thought I would. I'll leave after my last exam - the 20th - and meet my beautiful Sister in France, and she'll travel with me to Italy, then I'll hopefully meet up with my friend Marnie for Greece and Turkey.

So what all this really means is that my time in Scotland, and at St. Andrews, is coming to an end. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I still waver between loving and hating this place on a daily basis. It's beauty is unarguable. Many of my recent shifts at the restaurant have been breakfast shifts, meaning I wake up at 6 and walk out of St. Andrews, where the footpath runs out and the farmland begins. Anyone who knows me would likely agree that I am not a morning person. But I look forward to these mornings. They alone have allowed for my most personal relationship with Scotland. Hardly anyone is about at that time of the day. It's just me walking along the road. The birds have started their first songs of the day. I often see a pheasant darting across the field and his brassy feathers shine in the slanted morning sun. The lighting in Scotland is nothing if not dramatic. I'm not sure why, but the lighting here is so often so glorious. It will shine through the clouds, or come in low over the fields, or hit the earth in bright rays that illuminate a tiny part of ocean or hill which all of a sudden becomes exceptionally beautiful. I don't know why the light is like this here, but it constantly and literally takes my breath away.

This is especially true on these early mornings, when Scotland opens its beauty before my eyes and I fall in love with it. The field just outside town is very intriguing to me. Initially I loved it for its dark, moist soil that the tractor had turned up, filling the air with the organic, alluring smell only freshly turned soil can evoke. It reminds me of the garden in our farm in Iron Bridge. Even though I was very young when I left that house I remember loving the dirt, and that specific smell of soil. It makes me want to grab a handful and crumble it in my hand because I know exactly what it will feel and smell like. Like something that makes things grow.
The blackbirds - the ones from the nursery rhymes who always end up in pies or poking peoples' eyes out - wander around the field, picking out worms or bugs here and there.

One day I walked by and the entire field was blanketed with the greenest stems of new grass. The field was transformed into a photograph, or painting. Each blade of grass was only about an inch tall, and insignificant on its own, but when viewed in the context of the whole field it positively glowed with a strong pallet of Spring Green. And the morning sun - dramatic as all Scottish light is - illuminated its perfect rows, which were parallel to one another and raced up to meet the sky at the horizon.

I may despise the aristocracy of St. Andrews, but I love its fields. And its mountains. And its oceans. And its dramatic lighting. And its highland cattle, and sheep with their baby fleecy white lambs. And its streams, like the one that winds its way through St. Andrews which I just discovered last week. I love Scotland. I am in love with Scotland. I don't want to say goodbye. I don't want to talk about it like it was something I was a part of, and now am not. I want to always be a part of it. We have a personal relationship now, afforded by the mornings and the mountains. It may only have been a part of me for a short time, but it has entered my poetic memory, and that memory never fades.

Travelling notes

I'm not pretending that I know everything; I'm not assuming I know nothing. What travelling has taught me is once again to always question, and wonder. Assume nothing, leave yourself open to change, opportunities, chance and fate - they bring you happenings both amazing and catastrophic: neither can be foreseen.

During my recent travels across Europe (Warsaw-Krakow-Hamburg-Amsterdam-Kiel-Munich-Vienna-Budapest), I've had my wallet stolen, forgotten my passport, been piss broke and slept in a couchette with complete strangers no more than a foot away, the air stale and smelling of people - traces of smoke, lingering perfume, coffee, chips...smells of other peoples' lives intermingling with my own. Here lives do intermingle. On trains, planes, and in hostels I've learned life stories, inspirations for leaving home and launching into unknown countries, leaving comfort for questions and safety for ambiguity.

Of course there are also comforting things about travelling. Concluding that, to use a cliche, things are the same everywhere, for example. On the bus ride to Auschwitz I watched as an old Polish man shovelled snow from his driveway. For amusement's sake only, he flung the shovelfull of snow high into the air and smiled to see it fall glistening down around him. People are the same everywhere.

In Amsterdam a pregnant cat had made her nest in dark corner just outside the sliding door of our cafe. Upon passing her, visitors from every corner of the world made the same gesture -stopping, bending down, scratching her nose and making the universal "tch tch" sound of animal lovers the world over. People are the same everywhere.

Maria and I sat in an uber posh cafe overlooking a canal in Amsterdam. Reflected light danced seductively in the waves outside the window. Amsterdam's finest sipped wine around us. Despite the surreal setting and we were the same two girls that laughed over Maria's inability pronounce "deteriorating" during the hour and half long, impossibly bumpy bus ride from Blind River to Kynoch. People are the same everywhere. And so am I.

A moment:

It is our last night in Krakow and we are walking back to our hostel - past the horse drawn cart clopping over the cobblestones, past the rows of stalls selling hand-carved wooden figures and brightly painted, pear-shaped dolls-in-dolls. The air smells of freshly baked bagels. It is the time of day where the sun lies close and golden over the city, making everything that was pretty, beautiful. The air is simultaneously soft and expectant, fresh and tangy - like a new blade of grass, at once comforting and dazzlingly new. The locals mill about, chatting in the square flanked by buildings that in any other city would be striking and glorious, but here are just the way it is.

Of a sudden a note shrills from the mouth of trumpet or flugel horn and fills the square. Faces turn upward. The sound comes from the sky, or some impossibly high place - the bell tower of the chapel to the left. It is a stone building, crowned on every peak by statues kissed gently by the last rays of sun. Above their heads the sound emerges. The musician is absent within the darkness of the steeple, leaving his brassy notes to wander masterless over the listeners beneath. They listen as if it were what they had waited all day to hear. The sound falls over their faces as they lift upwards, their mouths forming the slightest of nostalgic smiles. It loosens joints and smoothing worries so deep they had nearly been forgotten.

What are they thinking of, their faces static and vulnerable to the early evening air and all things twilight? For me the brass note brings a sharp and crystalline thought: a remembrance of fresh summer nights, of frogsong and new leaves unfolding, their cousins disintegrating beneath, a season turning from one to the next, days lengthening. The same feeling of expectation and longing, of newness and birth, development, freedom. Anticipation that this year, this month, this very day will bring something vivid and good if only the repetition of all that was and all that will be - this is what the trumpeter spills out from the highest point in Krakow to the world in this moment. It falls on the ears beneath and floats around and in and out and over and across the hands and feet of listeners listening to a few notes, a few golden notes in the golden sun in the cobbled square in a city so old we can no longer relate. This message. This song. A lone trumpeter in a bell tower. I stood, face upturned. I listened.

"This is life", I thought.

"And life is beautiful."