Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland by Kathleen Jamie

Author:Kathleen Jamie [Jamie, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, essays, nature, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, General, poetry, Anthologies (Multiple Authors)
ISBN: 9781786899804
Google: EdbODwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2020-08-06T23:28:31.698449+00:00

* ‘Doon ida ebb’, Peter Jamieson, New Shetlander, Summer 1973.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Solastalgia

MALACHY TALLACK

1.

We arrived in the autumn, as the warm days declined. We brought boxes filled with our respective pasts, and we stacked them in rooms that were not yet familiar. We merged our two lives in one place.

This was the first house we had shared, Roxani and I, and the first time either of us had lived in this town. We knew no one, and had little idea of our surroundings. Our only compass points were the supermarket, the train station, the hardware shop: practical places, each less than three minutes’ walk away.

In those first few weeks, as we tried to turn this house into something we could call a home, our world shrank. The space within these walls was what we saw and what we talked about. The smell of emulsion, of white spirit, of wet plaster, was what we breathed. We stripped wallpaper, replaced skirting, laid carpets, built furniture. We took bare rooms and helped them hold the life we had imagined. We populated this place with ourselves.

Those days were mostly spent indoors, amongst the tools of our labour: the brushes and the scrapers and the innumerable Allen keys. And when these were put away, they were replaced in turn by cardboard, empty boxes strewn like the leaves that were falling, then, in the garden.

It was not always a happy time. The space between what was and what could be, the awful list of things undone, was always on our minds. Both hopeful and wearying at once, the focus on that work, that space, became a kind of narrowing. And so we made our way outside.

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