Picture This: Abernethy’s Heavenly Lichyard

The silence and the light bleed from the bright corners of space. The colossal sky overhead roils and undulates in the fading sun and mountain winds while I stand, neck-craned and mouth agape, mimicking a sunflower. A small white-washed church sits contentedly beneath these accessible heavens, surrounded by the markers of the departed. I rest my arms along the stone wall embracing the lichyard and ponder the people in their wooden boxes staring through the wood and earth and sky. Great, frosted peaks rear up behind me and beyond this strip of land the earth tumbles down to the winding River Spey. This is a liminal space levitating between bismuth planes of sky and earth, mountain and river.

Perhaps, when the longing to be and to see has faded, this would be a safe place to catalog the passing millennia in scintillating clouds. The smell of life is overwhelming, that fecund verdancy so common to Scotland’s green spaces but here shot through with a crystalline purity from high-altitude snows. The same flavor huddles on my tongue. It is cold, and Sarah brings her warmth to me through outstretched arms. The sun slips behind the distant hills, blowing its bright goodbye kiss at the bellies of the vaporous airships. This is the moment we stop and stare in silence, just as do the people in the earth.