A beautiful day, all sunshine and squawks from gulls mobbing eagles over the tidal loch. Everything clear, sky wide and still, garden flowers heads up to the light giver, safe from wilderley gales. Still. I wasn’t and that’s me all over. I say I am not a busy flicktwit, fussing about dust nor to-do lists, but I am, I confess, a woman who was a mother at 20 and birthed 5 children and who outlived a husband and who now has no idea who she is. I was somebody once, I remember that, the buzz of it, the exhaustive demands, the have-to go here or there, the suddenness of immediacy. A boat in trouble, a guest overboard, another 4 for dinner, a crying mother from a cottage because it had rained all week and everything and everyone was cold and wet. I warmed her obviously, tumbled dried her towels and clothes and Himself went up there, into the hills and sorted the dodgy fire. All fires were dodgy on Tapselteerie. I have no idea how we got away with that, but I do remember many fine folk, mostly women (no surprise there) who knocked on my kitchen door with faces. I can see those faces now. And here’s my thought. They came, they asked, they were brave and they were pulled in to the warm and fed and watered.

One of them said she played the fiddle. She was beautiful, Irish, four kids. I asked her, bring your fiddle, and she did, and we danced a story from her past, one I recognised. The fiddle captured me in that moment because it is the voice of stories, of history, of deep time. And that thinks me. In my olding, many memories scoot back, slowered, rainbowed, probably nonsense, but I get glimpses of someone bringing in wild salmon, the fish caught on it’s way up to spawning, full fat and strong. I remember receiving this huge fish, welcoming in the fishermen, whisky poured, the laugh around us in that kitchen, the fiddleplay. Even in times when no fiddle played, the fiddle played. Deep time. Those fishers long gone. The wild salmon too. They were then and this is now.

I’m not so sure about now, but, then, I am guessing that in deep time, not many felt sure about their now. Olding is not fun. I should qualify that. It still isn’t fun but there are options and choices. Things hurt, bones mostly, but could be more. Thoughts slow, take time to land. Hearing might grow cloudy. Concentration striates, shifting all over the place, like a seconda on a harley with no map. I meet many of us, all bright and brittle all can do and all doing this olding thing, feeling sore and tired and bloody determined.

One young woman, younger than my youngest, said to me yesterday this…..You inspire me. You are so ……

That was just what I needed to hear. On i go, fiddleplay lead on.