all the trees are naked now, and i wear a hat and gloves every day. it’s this bitingly cold weather that i always forget i love until it returns. edinburgh is triumphant in early winter - there’s a huge german christmas market near prince’s street with endless food and hot mead, wine, buttered rum. juxtaposed against scott’s monument is an ice skating rink all sparkly and pulsing pop music, christmas carousels, a big glow-y ferris wheel, tiny roller coasters that still scare the shit out of me, strings of light everywhere. still, the colder it gets the more i’m inclined to stay indoors, and the more i’m thinking about lighting incense in my room, buying plants and groceries with my mom, eating greasy food in a diner with my dad.
for the past several weeks i’ve been delighting in the time i get to spend alone in edinburgh; i’ve met some really incredible humans here, and i’m already planning road trips across the states. but today i woke up early (ish) and left my room to walk to the bethany shop, a strangely cozy and pretty rundown thrift store/cafe that i always stumble upon late at night, but never seem to be able to find when i actively seek it out during the day. then i bought an edna o’brien book at a little used bookstore with red persian rugs and a perpetually lit fireplace. the frigid weather fits scotland - every shop and building i passed today looked so comforting and old and settled, and it suddenly occurred to me how much i’m going to miss this city. so strange that i have homes in so many different places now.
this month is a blur of new places and bruised hips from sleeping on floors. i loved the melancholy of dublin, sat on oscar wilde’s doorstep, got a certificate for pouring my own pint at the guinness factory, sat in tiny warm pubs and drank irish coffee in galway, ate greasy chips at an old nautical restaurant, collected sea glass and shells and stood in awe by the seagulls and the windy sunset at the galway shore, missed a flight in the colossal frankfurt airport and managed to remain “calm and collected,” warmed my hands by a fire pit at the christmas markets in stockholm, ate curry root vegetable soup and drank glögg while listening to swedish christmas carols outside, danced to techno music wearing a furry cape in the absolut ice bar, spent two and a half hours at a stockholm buffet eating ice cream and talking to two of the most lovely friends, and spent seven hours in the copenhagen airport very much alone in crowds of danes. it’s thanksgiving today and i want nothing more than to be home with the macy’s day parade on tv and my mother listening to joni mitchell over the clattering of pots in the kitchen, laying out her grandmother’s lace tablecloths stained with wine and food that i pretend goes all the way back to the hungarian meals of my own grandmother’s youth. but tonight i’m going to the opening of edinburgh’s christmas fair where there will be a snow dome and a ferris wheel and lights everywhere. then i’m eating a scottish meal at mum’s comfort food. not too shabby.
studying abroad is strange and unsettling and profoundly exciting. the air feels like winter today. all of the leaves have fallen. this city is extraordinarily beautiful and it’s also a little bit sad. even my dad noticed it when my parents visited for the week. my mom noticed the scottish sky. and she noticed the scottish sky the next day. and the next day. i’ve never seen clouds like i’ve seen here - i’m assuming it has to do with edinburgh’s proximity to the sea, the damp climate, the fact that the weather is so distinctively turbulent. clouds make piles here. sometimes the sun peaks through them and turns them different colors. i think i’ll miss the scottish sky like it’s a human being when i leave edinburgh.
i spent a weekend in london, took a wild romp through glasgow, and saw more old crumbly magnificent abbeys in the scottish borders than i could wrap my mind around. traveling makes me feel deeply independent - like i can really do all the things i never thought i’d be able to do (including navigating myriad foreign cities with a sense of direction the size of a small pea…) it also makes me feel smaller than i’ve ever felt before - every time i see something new i want to see five other new places. i also want to see everything i haven’t gotten to see in edinburgh - i’m starting an edinburgh bucket list tonight.
i’ll be traveling almost every weekend until i go home now. next weekend, dublin…then stockholm, portugal, maybe rome, probably paris. europe’s just a platter of experiences at this point, which is a little bit of a weird feeling (hooray for privilege, right?!). i’m sure i’ll probably never get to experience the world like this again. i don’t fully understand that people live in these places, i understand mostly that i’ve been given the opportunity see them and to feel at once so naive and so alive.
it’s been hard to make myself write (despite gentle prodding from some women i love a lot) since i spent a weekend in the highlands, because how do you write about the highlands? you write something about the fog, something about sheep and highland cattle, about the moment when the persistent storm clouds parted into the bluest sky i’ve ever seen in my life. the mountains, the pines. but then there’s the melancholy that is an exquisitely beautiful place turned tourist destination after the decimation of culture that follows warfare. there’s the strange feeling of becoming rooted to a place just as you acknowledge how removed from it you feel.
i slept and listened to joni mitchell (she sings about her confusing experience as a temporary expatriate and i feel way too satisfied) and read seamus heaney’s north on the bus between distilleries (one), war memorials (two), greengreengreen fields and big craggy rocks (countless). reading irish poetry in scotland illuminated the uk in a pretty magical way - i’m not at all suggesting that the scottish experience is the same as the irish experience (especially heaney’s particular northern irish experience), but there’s something about the green and the wet air and the gray skies (gray buildings and cobblestone, gray edinburgh!) that has made me feel so connected to these poems of history and myth and bogland and political/social unrest. and then, in turn, the poems describing the beauty and horror of millennia-old bog bodies uncovered in denmark and northern germany showed me the history and beauty and sadness of this city, this climate, these highlands.
this is why i study literature, this is when i am reminded that there is something so timeless and connected and human in the written and read and spoken word. i want to say something profound about this intersection between person and place and history and memory and experience, but all i really know is that this is what it’s like to live in the world. there will always be something beautiful that i can’t put my finger on, beautiful things will usually be a little bit sad and a little bit funny, and there will always be an intermingling of strangeness and familiarity that words can never encompass but might (if we’re lucky) shed a little bit of light on.
North
Seamus Heaney
I returned to a long strand,
the hammered shod of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.
I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly
those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,
those in the solid
belly of stone ships,
those hacked and glinting
in the gravel of thawed streams
were ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship’s swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight -
it said Thor’s hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,
the hatreds and behindbacks
of the althings, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.
It said, “Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Keep you eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.”
this week i conquered my first scottish cold, and my first scottish load of laundry.
so many wonderful new faces and new connections. a girl from my postcolonial poetry class invited me to her flat to have a “proper roast” and i drank hot chocolate with 19 year old kitty (from an elite london private school, draped in an enormous fur coat) one early afternoon. i had one of the most stimulating (and confusing) conversations i’ve ever had about feminism with a visiting student from germany. i have lovely new american friends from all across the states, because hey, here we are together in scotland: displaced and exhilarated.
still, i’m already confident that my memory of this place will always be painted by my solitary drifting through main streets and down alleys, always fueled by music, always simultaneously in awe of the present and very much inside of my own head.
i went out in the wet early evening last night, and every street smelled like wood burning. then i met some lovely writers/fellow bibliophiles, joined my first society, and had a beer in a tiny old pub with live folk music. the musicians sat in a circle and sipped whiskey over fiddles, banjos, lutes. it didn’t even feel real.
the thing about being here is that there are parts of me in places other than here. i think that’s okay.
