One of the great benefits, I've always thought, of being married to a secular faux-Jew from Beverly Hills (with humanist/atheist trappings) is that in his desire to break free from his 1970s Beverly High/camping in Griffith Park/shopping at Nieman's with mom for school shirts/T-ball in La Cienega Park mentality, he likes to travel. Not only does he like to travel, but he likes to fully assume the persona of whichever country is lucky enough to have him at the time. Last night, for example, while I was in the kitchen trying to do something creative with cold roast chicken and parnsips and tiny tomatoes (adding the ubiquitous pasta element of course) I could hear strains of Andy Stewart eminating delicately from his iTunes ("let the wind blow high, let the wind blow low, Johnnie where's ye troosers" - or something like that). I'm not immune to this myself as I've been singing Amy MacDonald in my head for the last few days and like Avril Lavigne, it just won't go away. But mine's in my head. I choose to say nothing. We have our Sunday lunch for dinner pasta (and yes the parsnips were brilliant in it) and nothing is said. But this morning we wake up, as we are wont to do, at about 5, 5:11am exactly in fact, and the first thing out of his mouth is: "I really am serious about learning the bagpipes."
I close my eyes and try to go back to the warm twilight sleep I'm in, before I start thinking that my house is claustrophobic (well, how could you not, having spent the last two weeks in a nine-bedroom sprawling pile on the edge of the Cairngorms) or that I'm miserable in the city (classic BW behaviour on returning from the UK - happens every time and will go away soon I'm sure) but my mind is still lingering on the moors, the burned heather, the old heather, the bright green mosses, the pale green lichen, the grey skies that move and whirl around you in a constant Mother Nature-delivered slide show, the clouds that hang so gently over the glen, the mist that rises from the softwood woods, the crunch of one's boot on the frosty ground, the scattered carcases of dead rabbits, always without their eyes, and the occasional white mass in the burn (a dead sheep). I have a picture of the boy, Jack, only eleven years old, coming out just before midnight on New Year's Eve, standing by the dry and sagging, but still beautiful Christmas tree, and belting out Scotland the Brave on his pipes, and watching all the women standing around and biting back their tears as they watch him. It's hard not to love Scotland, especially on Hogmanay. Everyone said we would.
But I do wake up and I look at him, and he really is serious.
"Could you live here?" said my friend Andrea, as we walked alongside the burn, climbing over rocks, following the dogs who were clambering easily, and trying not to fall in. It was a grey day and it was raining very softly. I think it was New Year's Day. The mare and her filly, now six months old, were in their big raincoats in the field on the left of us, and we could see the house in front of us. My mother's terrier was lost, again, as usual, after another rabbit. This was the second time that day. The first we'd found him in the lunch hut, which actually wasn't his fault. But as I looked for him and called his name, I was calling "fucker" in my head after every "Ti-neeeeee" I yelled across the glen. I looked at her and thought about it. "No," I said. "I don't think I could be so far away from everything." But now I wonder. We grew up entirely in isolation, away from the village, away from our friends (not that we had that many friends as children, and not that we really cared, as far as I remember) on a farm surrounded by beautiful ancient oak and beech woods, and if I am entirely honest with myself, I don't think I am ever as happy as when I am out in it. In a field, or a wood, or by a river, or the sea. Out in it, in the thick of it. Nature. I'm not talking about the Teva-wearing kind either. That solitude really is heaven for me.
Oops. Time to wake the littles for school.
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