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by Leonie Charlton


  DAY TWENTY-TWO

  Sunrise at Callanish

  The alarm went off at 3.30am. I was instantly awake, we had less than an hour to pack the tent, load Chief and Ross and drive along to Callanish I before sunrise at 4.24am. There was a strong tangerine glow on the horizon and my heart raced with a childlike excitement. We made it just in time and were standing by the stone-drawn cruciform as the sun rose. I spun round slowly, taking it all in, our shadows going on forever, the stones turning an earthy pink. The sky folded into mauves and azures, a breath of cloud turned scarlet in a single second. Then the whole of the sun was visible between the stones, their shadows reaching across the turf. I walked down the longest shadow to a large flat rock, knelt and emptied the bead purse. There were four left: an unpolished lapis bead; a handmade glass bead – cobalt blue and tubular; a branch of red coral; an off-round seed pearl. It was perfect, to leave the last of beads here, at Callanish, as the sun climbed.

  I stood up and walked away from the beads towards a solitary standing stone. Behind it were the silver reaches of Loch Ceann Hùlabhaig, in the far distance I could see those dark hills we had been in only two days before. The whole of my shadow fitted on the stone. The rock was ridged like an oyster shell and the striations ran through me. That was me. Beady. Me. Leonie. Mum had named me after a French writer. ‘Léonie,’ she’d say with her perfect French accent. I’d always shied away from my name, it was somehow too big, too brave, too lion-like for me. Maybe now it was time to step into it, my name given to me by a beautiful young woman some forty-five years ago who believed in Faeries, in her children, and that the world was their oyster.

  ‘Look, a Short Eared Owl,’ I said. We were driving slowly across the moorland towards Stornoway, in good time to catch the 7am ferry to Ullapool. The bird glided for long soft seconds before disappearing over a knoll.

  ‘That might be the last one we see for a while,’ I added.

  ‘I can’t wait to come back,’ said Shuna. From the tone of her voice I knew we shared the same yearning.

  I looked in the side mirror, saw Ross’s ears, forelock, one calm eye, and in that moment felt radiant and full of love: love for Ross, for Shuna, for Chief; love for these islands, their people and wildlife and landscapes; love for all and everyone I was travelling home to. And there was something else: this journey had helped me find a way to let go of the guilt and pain which had been silting inside me for so many years. In its place acceptance, for Mum, for myself, for the two of us, had flowed in a little each day. I opened the window and reached both hands out, letting the cold air burn through my fingers, light rising, rising on that clear June morning.

  I’m ready to stop chasing the idea of a better relationship. I’m ready to stop hounding the ‘what ifs’, and for the ‘what ifs’ to stop hounding me. It was what it was, Mum. Deeply flawed. Real. Human. Difficult. You were impossible. I was impossible. And all the same we loved each other. It was far from perfect. But it’s enough to know that I loved you, that I love you now, that I feel you in me when I see a Spider threading her silk web, a Bat feeding in the evening air, each time I smell the velvet muzzle of a Horse. I’ll be travelling paths you opened to me for the rest of my life, travelling them with lion-hearted love.

 

 

 


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