Picture This: Black Cuillin Backdrop

Skye’s redemption arrives on the last day. A week of rain and cloud-choked land finally passes into the east, just as I begin the long drive south. In the pubs hazy with smoldering peat smoke, pint at hand, I toyed with the thought that perhaps I had crossed a misty portal to the Fortunate Isles. Anything was possible in that blinding opacity. In the present, the simple road runs like a ribbon across the island; I slow down the car and ease onto the gravel shoulder. Air stampedes across the open space. Green and snow and fresh and stone are all I smell. Sunlight lances through the ether to flicker across the sawtooth Black Cuillins.

These earthborn deities hung invisible in the air beside me for seven days. My mind begins to clear like the skies over Skye. I stand on the verge of returning home. What else hides next to me, thundering silent appeals? What would I find if only I would wait for the fog to clear, if only I would range out, seeking, without any certain goal? But that I have done these last years, and look what I have found: I don’t know when I will be back. If only I could remember to think that each day.