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.