The shedding of skins, and moments of grace
Riverwitch #7
‘Riverwitch’ is a collaborative project with my husband David Knowles, author of Elvers by Moonlight. It’s the re-membering of a blog duet we began in 2014, mapping our dislocation from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to Donegal in north-west Ireland. It offers a story-within-a-story as, ten years on, we try to make sense of the ways in which places claim us, mark us – and then, when it’s time, cast us loose. We take turns every Wednesday to revisit an old post and add new reflections and insights. If you’re new here, for the background to this project, please read this post first.
The previous post in this series was David’s ‘The Lamb That Said Goodbye’, which he posted last week. Read it here.
The audio of my posts is for paid subscribers, below the paywall.
March, 2014
1. There is a sense in which places are like lovers. Not all places are forever, just as not all lovers are forever. Sometimes we find ourselves with them for only a while – because they have something to show us, or teach us, or we have something to show or teach them. And then we need to leave them behind, and move on.
In that moving on, there is always mourning. No matter how necessary the departure might be, a part of you stays behind with each place (or lover) that you leave. And so, as I return now for a while to Lewis, I realise that every welcoming move I have made towards the river is laced with the impending loss of the sea. The joy and the mourning are interwoven, inseparable. As I slowly shed my sense of belonging to this place as a snake might shed a papery old skin, I find that the new skin beneath it is raw, sensitive, thin. I haven’t yet grown into it. The old skin might have become calloused and wrinkled, but it was mine and it was hard-won. And the fresh, new skin beneath has grown out of the old: its very existence depends on it.
Not all leaving is rejection: neither the leaving of lovers, nor the leaving of places.
One day, far in the future, caught between the boulders on some storm-ridden Hebridean beach, a strange leathery sack-like object will be found. There will be no way into it, no use will be found for it, and it will be tossed aside to crumble eventually into the sand.
But all that it once nourished and protected will live on, growing and changing and shedding in turn.
2. There’s a curious sadness in unplanned leavings, when you remember all the things that you won’t be able to say goodbye to because they only come round once a year – and now you are going, before they will return. If only I’d known last year, you think, that this would be the last time I’d see the first oystercatcher in February, or the first marsh marigold in the bog, then I could have stood and fixed them in my memory, and told them how much I’ve loved them. The signs that spring is finally coming, after the long dark days of an Outer Hebridean winter, are the signs you value most of all. Each year the same irrational relief, pushing aside for another season the fear that maybe this time, there will be no return of the light.
In this harsh place, spring doesn’t announce itself with a clatter of bursting buds or the suddenness of a dawn chorus in garden trees. Spring creeps up on you subtly, little by little, day by day. The slightest greening of the grass down by the geo; the briefest cry of a passing skylark overhead. But I have grown to know these small signs, and to love them, and most beloved of all is the return of the breeding pair of lapwings who come to the headland each spring to hatch their young. I love those lapwings: their thick rounded wingtips, their fluttering, butterfly flight, the frantic circling cries as strangers come close to the place where they’ve laid their eggs. It has been bothering me that the lapwing would come this year and I wouldn’t be there to welcome them, and then to rush back to the house to tell David, ‘The lapwings are coming! The lapwings are coming!’ as if they were the vanguard of some light-bearing army, arriving to save us from all that is dark and full of sorrow.
So it was with immense joy that I saw a single lapwing circling the headland early yesterday morning – and I remembered that last year in March there had been a single scout too, scoping out the territory for May’s longer stay. I stood, prayerfully, and lifted my head to watch for as long as the lapwing flew.
And then this morning, twenty or so whooper swans landed on the loch at the bottom of the croft, the first of the northwards-migrating flocks that will fill our days with pleasure and sound for the next couple of weeks. I’m filled with gladness not to have missed them too, and am reminded of Ruth Padel’s beautiful poem on migration from The Mara Crossing, ‘Time to Fly’:
You go from pole to pole, you go because you can,
you sleep and mate on the wing.
You go because you need a place to shed your skin
in safety.
October 2024
It had been my habit, for the full four years that we lived in Breanish, to walk down to the stony bay with the dogs at the crack of dawn. Most mornings, a solitary seal would be bobbing in the sheltered waters; she would stay there, still as can be, while I sang a song to her. The song I would sing was a beautiful old fragment from South Uist, called ‘The Seal-Woman’s Sea-Joy’. It was written, so it is said, to express the joy of the folkloric selkie woman when she regains the sealskin that her husband stole from her seven long years before – and when she stands clutching that skin in front of the waves again, at long last anticipating her return to her natural element, the sea.
It had always seemed to me that the seal was listening; she would know the old story, after all.
The morning after I made the journey back to Lewis from Donegal – after the week in which I had taken possession of that little old cottage by the river, and lived in it for a while, alone – I went down to the bay again, with the dogs.
The seal lay dead on the stony beach.
Mikladalur's Kópakonan on the Faroe Islands
