Old wounds #3
But Shona wasn’t one to brood for long. Feeling restless and a little overwhelmed by the never-ending stream of thoughts, she jumped up and went outside.
She carefully locked the doors behind her – now that there was indeed something to steal inside!
– and fetched Nessie from the pasture by the malt barn.
The alpaca seemed happy about the company because she kept nudging Shona enthusiastically.
“Are you bored, sweetie? You miss the sheep?” Her father had picked up his herd after they had done their job of ‘mowing’ the meadow.
“Now that the business is all set up and ready to go, you can spend all day every day with me again,” she promised as she petted Nessie’s soft neck.
Without giving it any thought, Shona walked over to the church and entered the cemetery.
She only visited very rarely because, fortunately, she hadn’t had to mourn many loved ones in her life.
Then again, she had suffered the worst loss a child could experience.
But she had never really met her mother, as she had only been a newborn.
Even her grandmother, who had passed away when Shona was four years old, featured in only the vaguest of memories: the taste of her amazing shortbread, her delicate scent of cloves and apples, her soft body, which had felt so different from the hugs of her lean father.
Was it possible to miss a person you didn’t even know or whom you could hardly remember?
This question had been nagging at her for a while.
The cemetery lay almost deserted when she entered, and the few other visitors paid her no heed beyond exchanging a friendly nod of acknowledgement.
Nobody even said anything about Nessie who had come along, so Shona was able to make her way to the family plot undisturbed.
This was where so many generations of Frasers had found their final resting place.
She sat down on the narrow bench facing the grave and stared at the familiar, weathered granite stone with its many inscriptions.
The first Fraser had been buried here in 1784.
She had no connection to them beyond the name; that was what she had always told herself.
But maybe she had been mistaken, and everything that made her who she was – her life, her energy, her joy, longings and fears – originated with those buried here, in this place?
She felt the goose bumps on her bare arms and wondered if they were due to the cooler temperatures – there had been another heavy downpour earlier – or rather to this sudden realisation that the past impacted her present more than she had been willing to admit.
“Would I have become someone else if you hadn’t died, Ma?
” she asked quietly, wondering why her voice sounded so shaky.
She had never spoken to her mother when she came to the graveyard.
Or anyplace else, for that matter. There had never been a single mother-daughter conversation in her life and there never would be.
Maybe for the first time, she became painfully aware of this absence, this hitherto unnamed, elusive longing.
“You can’t miss what you don’t know!” How often had she heard something to this effect?
Stated confidently by all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, not necessarily referring to her or the mother she hadn’t known.
But now she was certain that the statement was not true.
Her chest tightened and she felt tears well up in her eyes.
An unquenchable longing took hold of her, and for the first time in her life, she cried for her mother.
Shona felt a little foolish, but she couldn’t stop the tears from falling.
Instead, she pressed her face into Nessie’s soft fur.
When the tears subsided after a while, she felt strangely relieved.
It was as if a burden she had never consciously carried had been lifted from her shoulders.
Nessie nudged her and looked at her with large, gentle eyes.
As if the alpaca knew her pain! “You don’t have a mummy either, do you?
” Shona sniffled and wiped the last tears from her cheeks. Then she stood up.
She felt a little shaky and wasn’t sure what to do next.
Going home was not an option; she didn’t want to pretend as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested. But before leaving the cemetery, she stepped up to the gravestone and traced the lettering that belonged to her mother with her fingertips.
“Elizabeth ‘Bonnie’ Fraser – beloved wife and mother,” it read.
“Next time I’ll bring you flowers,” she promised softly.
Then she squared her shoulders and left, with confident strides and Nessie by her side.
From the graveyard, she turned left onto a path that soon led out of the village without meeting any other people.
She shivered a little; the small woods in which she found herself were quite chilly.
It smelled faintly of autumn already. Well, she wasn’t going to complain!
Kirkby had been blessed with an unusually warm summer and very few of the usual bad weather interludes.
If she was honest, she was looking forward to autumn and winter, even if the leaden grey skies and icy rains could really weigh you down.
As soon as the tourist season ended, Kirkby turned inwards and became quiet.
So quiet that it was hard to ignore your own thoughts.
She reckoned that the fear of being with her thoughts was the reason why she had lived in London for years.
It was always so crowded and noisy there that you could easily supress thoughts and feelings you didn’t want to deal with.
For her, the anaesthetic of big city life had worked well for years. Until it hadn’t any longer.
The turning point had come about a year ago, when she went to the Isle of Skye for that Highland dance workshop.
Suddenly she felt as much at the mercy of her own thoughts as of the dreadful weather that had prevailed all weekend.
Strangely enough, she found both rather refreshing.
It made her feel truly alive, at one with herself and her surroundings.
At the time, she hadn’t seen what was going on and had attributed these feelings to the strenuous, energetic dance practice.
But back in London, her life started to feel increasingly stale and sad and …
empty. One of her many friends had suggested she might be experiencing depression, but she had known that wasn’t quite it.
The truth was, she was homesick! She was shocked to find that somehow felt even worse than being depressed.
She certainly would have preferred to get a prescription and do therapy while continuing her life in London that she liked so much.
But homesickness knew only one cure: going home.
What on earth was she supposed to do in Kirkby?
She had not the slightest idea. Nevertheless, she had trusted her gut instinct and handed in her notice.
It had been Kieran Gibbs, her trainer, mentor and employer, who had planted the seed that she could open her own distillery.
He hadn’t said it outright, but the message was clear enough.
Accepting her notice, he told her that her talents were wasted in a hip bar and that she really belonged in production.
This little seed had quickly sprouted and grown.
When she came home that winter for her cousin Ian’s wedding, her family had hardly believed that she was really planning to stay.
Her da had been delighted, of course, but her siblings and cousins were sceptical that Shona would choose to live in Kirkby from now on.
She couldn’t blame them. Nine months later, she still had a hard time believing it herself.
But things had fallen into place, as if it was all meant to be.
The old distillery had been in better shape than expected, and people were excited about the idea that Kirkby would have local whisky production again.
Support from the residents was huge among all kinds of people, but her biggest supporter was her father.
Marlin had never asked her why she had come home, and she had never told him her reasons.
Maybe because homesickness and longing sounded a little childish, not like good reasons for a grown woman to make such a life-changing decision and act on it too.
Shona had never shared these thoughts with anyone because she found her feelings rather embarrassing.
They had a ring of weakness and immaturity to them, or at least that was what she had thought for months.
More recently, her insistent thoughts increasingly suggested a different take: perhaps returning home could be a sign of the exact opposite, of maturity and strength?
How else to explain that she had found her destiny here, in this seemingly inhospitable place?
Perhaps her roots had called out to her loudly enough that she couldn’t not hear them?
Taking it a step further, perhaps it made good sense to return to these roots, to ground herself, to address her origins and her past for the sake of becoming fully herself?