the 19th year of Islands of the Heart (Isle of Iona)

ahead the island waits
rain ushers us over and in
drops its veils behind us
 

Notes on the Journey

Sun all the way up to Stafford services – lake clean, wildfowl healthy now (I wrote to them a couple of years ago to say how much I loved the oasis that is Stafford services, but I was intending to boycott them after I'd seen the state of the raggedly-clipped wings of their Canada geese – don't suppose that made a difference, but something has) – where I peel off layers, walk round the lake as we always used to, talk in my head to my absent daughter and our dead hounds.

*

Moffat in its little bowl of end-of-day sunlight. M in hospital. This time last year, our laughter (I’d told the B&B owner that M, in contrast to me, would eat anything: magpies, stray cats, passing children).

A single lapwing flapping alongside; I realise I’ve seen none in a year. In dusky light I walk the old walk, sans dog. 

Above, a huge arc of geese with tiny peeping voices. Pinkfoot?

*

Glasgow.

On the ringroad I’m listening to a Desert Island Discs interviewee speak of a track for her mum, who has dementia (Bread’s ‘I would give everything I own’ – I remember that track so well) and I’m in tears thinking of my late mum’s dementia and the unshareable pain of it. Probably unsafe to drive due to the fact that I can't see for tears, I slow up; and remember the same stretch of road, just a year or two after my mum died, when Radio 4 had me in tears again, too, with a programme on Alzheimer’s.

*

Loch Lomond.

For much of the journey I have the road and the loch to myself. If heaven didn’t have this slant light and silvered water, I wouldn’t want to go there; but it seems it has and I am there.

And there, and there, are little shingled beaches we stopped at to let my collie out for a pee or a drink. She’s long dead; and you too, now.

*

Oban. 

Ticket kiosk guy is outrageously flirtatious.

I buy thick home-made soup: the young guy behind the counter is gracious about my mixing the tomato soup with the butternut and chilli. I take it over to the boats.

The ‘Isle of Lewis’ is about to leave for Barra, five hours’ sail into the wide Atlantic. Tempted. When did I last throw all responsibilities and commitments overboard? The ferry pulls out and I continue sitting on the seawall.

The Seal Trip skipper with the painted plaster pirate onboard changes the chalked time of the next trip from 1 to 1.30 (no punters). As I walk past at 1.20 he changes it again, to 2 (ditto).

By the ferry queue a notice asks me to be sure not to bring any bees, deliberately or carelessly, to Colonsay or Oronsay, where they’re striving to help the native black bee (apis mellifera mellifera) to thrive.

*

I’m not over any of the many deaths that have torn holes in my life the last decade.

*

Mull.

First on, last off.

Drizzle. I rattle over the cattle grid, and there, right there, just ahead and just above is a golden eagle, fingering the damp air.

Keats’ 37 ‘miserable miles’ covered at a rather greater speed than he was able. And if I’d had to walk, I’ve waterproofs and healthy lungs.

Pennyghael: a new sign says ‘Otters crossing for 6 miles’. At least the otters are coming out of decline.

*

Drizzle still as I pull up at Fionnphort, unload my bags at the slipway, park my car and walk back down. I need two candles for the two retreats I’m leading; the Ferry Shop always keeps lovely ones made by the Findhorn Community at Erraid, nearby. No candles.

I think of S, so suddenly and shockingly in hospital instead of with us; and L, who is travelling to be with her instead of us. I know that no one will sit in S and L’s customary seats in the group room. (Later: they don’t.)

*

The promised wind, docile all day, has got up in the Sound, and the flat-bottomed ferry pitches and swerves. My face is full of water and wind and I want to shout with the joy and pain of it all. I can’t see a thing but I wave wildly towards the Iona slipway and the hotel, hoping the people I know will have arrived, people I have come to love, will see me. And they’re there, down at the jetty, waiting to greet me, in drizzle and wind.

Washing over us all, the trill of oystercatchers. A spill of white sand; the green waters of the Sound; a hug; a kind of home.

*

And then, for days, the sun.

Next year will be the 20th year of my Islands of the Heart writing retreats.

You can buy my latest poetry collection, poems from Iona, here.