Photo from Facebook
Imbolc or Imbolg, also called Saint Brigid's Day, is a Gaelic traditional festival.
It marks the beginning of spring, and for Christians, it is the feast day of Saint Brigid, Ireland's patroness saint.
It is held on 1 February, which is about halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
--Wikipedia
St Brigid’s Crosses
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Bill bought me this St. Brigid's cross pin from the gift shop at St. Brigid's Cathedral when we visited Kildare, Ireland, last year for my 75th birthday.  This saint, who was also dubbed as a female bishop, is known as St. Brigid of Kildare. |
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Photo from Cindy's Facebook page When Pope Francis, the Vatican staff and press corps took off for Africa, the Pontiff, who suffers from knee problems, apologized for not walking through the aisle to meet each person. So, one by one, each walked and greeted Francis at his seat, including Sandpoint's Cindy Wooden, Vatican Bureau Chief for Catholic News Service. Cindy is a close family friend and a former student. We are always beyond proud whenever we see these pictures. This one is especially lovely. Check out Cindy's story about the trip. https://www.catholicsun.org/2023/01/31/pope-arrives-in-congo-after-praying-on-flight-for-migrants/ ~~~~ Sandpoint High Bulldogs earned their league championship last night with a clean sweep of IEL 4A league games. Congratulations, Coach Love, staff and team. We are proud of you! |
----Jason Duchow Photograpy
b/01/bulldogs-sweep-4a-iel/https://bonnercountydailybee.com/news/2023/feb/01/bulldogs-sweep-4a-iel/
THE FIRST TIME MY GRANNY WENT TO SCOTLAND, she
went by way of London Heathrow,
rented an RV, knocked
a mirror off before leaving the
airport, and spent a month
seeking out her roots.
She came home with a shag tapestry
of a bagpiper that hangs in the
foyer like a coat of arms and no less than a thousand stories (or the
same story told a thousand times).
I grew up spending summers at her home in Oregon, where
she spooled threads of a family history that would be woven into
my understanding of what we belonged to.
Her maiden name had been Spurlock,
but perhaps as a penance
for her decision to divorce my
grandfather in the early sixties, she never
reclaimed it. Instead, she reminded
me constantly that I am not just Norwegian.
“You know you are Scotch-Irish too,” she said with a stern look.
Her family had immigrated to Canada and then later to America,
then California like everyone else during the Dust Bowl.
Being Scottish was the important
part of that, but in the photographs of
her long and lean father and her stout mother Lovie, one can only
detect how bothered they are by the obligation of holding still. Granny
belonged to whatever clan had her favorite colors.
The plaid fabric, still in its original wrapping in the hallway closet
decades after that trip, were green and purple over muted darks.
Others were red and black. More than the bagpipes and the kilts,
Granny loved the Border Collies and their trainers.
She taught herself how to whistle in
the crisp commands of the herdsmen,
though her penchant for wayward rescue dogs of questionable
brainpower never allowed her to use them.
The second time Granny went to Scotland, it was in an old amoxicillin
bottle, her faded name and a
decades-old prescription date barely legible from years of wear.
Like a treasured stuffed animal or
blanket, the bottle has been dragged along on any adventure of merit. She’s
been in glove boxes, rafting dry bags, Zip-Locks, old film containers, on the
top of Kilimanjaro, across the Strait of Magellan, over the Cascades, through
the Grand Canyon.
But it was always Scotland she wanted to return to.
Our desire to belong to somewhere or someone seems an integral
part of our social fabric and our identity. In the case of a
fourth-generation American, it is a placebo distilled from haphazard family trees, prejudice, and a scapegoat for obstinance.
It is an ancestral home we seek,
something we feel we may always return to, should this place lose its welcome.
It is the forever-longing song of the immigrant.
I came to Scotland to find a different kind of ancestral home.
I came to breathe the same air as my grandmother had breathed,
feel its earth beneath me, familiar to my spirit somehow. I needed
to understand why she wanted to belong here. Because there is not
a drop of Scottish blood in our DNA.
In her defense, our English-Irish parts are almost equal to our
Norwegian parts. And for some time in America, it was far easier to
be Scottish than Irish, and no one in California could differentiate
between the brogues anyway. This is the story I make up because
there is no one left to tell me otherwise. When our people pass,
they take all the answers to all the questions we never took the time
to ask. These are among my few regrets in life.
If being Scottish was a state of mind, I wanted to find that state.
I did not know if I would find it in the moors or the highlands or
deep in the Loch Ness with the other myths. Or perhaps in the
people who are bothered neither by wind nor rain nor anything at
all that I could identify.
We drove across the country from east to west, which only
takes so long because the roads are narrow and my husband had to
pull over occasionally to let his blood pressure recover. We crossed
the bridge to the Isle of Skye and made our way to a small stone
house on the shores of Loch Snizort. It is not a lake, but rather a
bay that faces the impossibly wide horizon of the Atlantic.
The stone house has a place in the history books. Bonnie Prince
Charles dressed as a handmaid and was rowed across the water to
hide from the English in the boathouse in the 1700s.
In the nearly three hundred years
since then, the place lost a few stones but
had been so expertly built, it was recently restored in one of those
renovation projects that ages even the most dedicated optimist. I
couldn’t help but stare at the stones and wonder about the hands
that first placed them here. What or who did we have in common?
Hundreds of years before the house was built, my Nordic
ancestors rowed their way through the Hebrides Islands. They
dropped sheep anywhere grass was growing so that upon their
return journey they would have an abundance of food. Some stayed.
Maybe we were that kind of Scottish. I stare out the windows at the
hillside where white sheep never seem to be moving but are always
in a different place. Like their shepherds, they are not bothered by
the weather.
“The neighbor’s herd lost over sixty sheep to the eagles last
year,” says Trevor. Trevor owns a croft (the Scottish word for
farm) on the shores of another loch (the Scottish word for lake).
He is a squat man with bowed legs and the kind of wide stride
one gets from years at sea. Before he settled here to raise sheep
and give wildlife tours and be a
fishing guide, he was a captain
on a herring boat (I assume this detail, not a lot of other kinds
of boats exist in the Hebrides). So the sheep may be bothered by
the eagles at least.
“They were hatched in Norway and raised on fish and lamb,”
Trevor says, “so they got a taste for it.” The pair of released eagles
now stun the full-grown sheep by hitting them in the back of the
head on a fly-by, then swooping down and helping themselves to a
fresh meal. The eagles are protected, so nothing can be done about
the matter. Soon, they’ll hatch chicks and teach them how to kill
sheep too.
“It’s evolution,” he says with a shrug, giving human intervention
a free pass.
We’ve come to this croft because it is one of the few places that
raises sheep for wool. Most of them are for eating. I approve of
both, but today I want to learn about the Hebrides patterns. Being
a fisherman, Trevor pulls out his sweater and shows us the details.
There is a painting of a magnificent horned ram on the wall. The
wool for this sweater was from that ram.
“My wife knit this for me,” he says, “so you see the cable has
two strands, not one. This is so when the gentlemen come to
port, the ladies know who is taken.” Mothers will knit their sons
sweaters with a single stranded pattern to let the women know he’s
looking for a wife.
The sweaters are made with wool that has not been washed
of its lanolin and knit in a tight stitch so as to repel water. Every
sweater tells a story: If not from which exact village the sailor
comes, then at least the island. His sweater has a bar for his island
and an anchor because he’s a captain.
“There’s only one captain on my island, so if I wash ashore,
they know who it is.”
There is purpose to the mundane and the minutia here. It is
as though sentimentality and meaning are put into all tasks. The
seed stitch pattern of the sweater, the colors and pleats of a kilt.
They are the love letters one wears so they do not forget to where
or whom they belong. I pledge to finish the sweater I have been
knitting my husband for several years. And to learn that double-
strand cable.
I ask my husband to leave me on the north cliffs of the island
on a blustery day so I may make my way home. Wanderers are
allowed to trespass through the farms so long as gates are left as
they are found. In the distance, I have seen a ridge that calls to
my compulsion to see the world from the top of places. I have
an unspoken belief I will see the answers from the right vantage
point.
I pack Granny in with my snacks and give her a pat as I trot
up the trail and into another world. I am sure a dragon will fly or
a Viking ship will sail by, but this is a land of primordial history so
old, there are dinosaur footprints on the shore. What part of this
was in my grandmother’s blood and bones? She didn’t even like
lamb.
As I wind my way upward through the cliffs, the views open up
to a landscape of grays and greens, vertical faces topped with irides-
cent grass. The sea spreads in infinite directions before me, washing
into the blue of the sky with a muddled line of mist. The sun is my
only defense against the ceaseless wind. It blows through my hood,
my hat, my hair, and into my ears with a constant rumble.
When the trail ends, I keep going. A patch of tourists grows
tiny behind me as they curiously watch me climbing into nowhere.
I cannot explain what I am looking for, that I struggle to belong to
a family who denies my memories, and cannot understand where
to belong if even the ancestors my grandmother promised are not
mine. If they asked, I would tell them I am looking for my story,
even as I write it.
The ground beneath my feet is a spongy soil that absorbs every
step with a forgiving bounce. My tracks and those before mine are
no match for this wind-battered, water-soaked bushland. I cannot
see where I have come from or where I am going.
It doesn’t matter, really, because where I am in that moment
is where I ought to be. Far in the distance there is a dark wall of
clouds rolling in from the southwest. They are bringing rain by the
afternoon, but for now they just grow taller, not closer. The ridge
sweeps softly to the west in an innocent grade, toward hills spotted
with sheep and white houses that look like they might be toys from
a train set. To the east, the grassy edge drops in cliffs that tumble
downward then spread like spilled paint in a flat, green puddle
toward the sea.
For hours, I battle the gusts and
climb, but the only thing that
hurts is my face. For as long as I have been running (or staggering)
against the gale, I have been grinning. I belong to the mountains,
this much I know.
When I come crashing through the front door in a mess of
mud, banana peels, and wind-chap, the first drops hit the house
from a horizontal angle. It is blowing over 40 miles per hour now.
It rains sideways into the stones for the next 24 hours. We watch
the water rise and fall with the tide and how the waves crash in
dramatic white explosions on the rocks across the loch. The birds
ride the air with wings spread, hovering motionless outside the
window. The house does not so much as tremble.
The light in Scotland is like no where I have been. The sky
moves by so fast that time on land seems to slow down. Only
the colors change. Like the sheep and the people, the landscape
is also not bothered by the weather, the news, war, progress,
disease, or apocalypse. Stone walls move for nothing, not even
millennia. Mangled trees shudder imperceptibly, but they hold
their windswept tilt regardless of the incessant breeze.
And then I understand.
Maybe it wasn’t the people Granny found kinship with. Maybe
it was the country. It was the stoic soils of a sea-bruised shore that
patiently waited for the tide to recede. It was the trees that bend
to the storms, but remain steadfast in the ground. It was the storm
clouds that bring far off promises and carry them to the north.
Scotland was the temporary home of dynasties and dinosaurs,
migrations and myths, a station at which history rested from time
to time to leave its mark. It was the sense that we belong to all this.
For a moment, I felt closer to her than I ever did when she
was alive.
My husband bought me a sweater as obvious as the shag
tapestry in Granny’s house. It was made from Trevor’s wool. I wore
it as I picked my way across the black rocks exposed by the low tide.
Strange sea creatures clung to them. They seem as old as the rocks.
The dismembered skeletons of boats lay caught between them. The
sky turned a churning gray and the howling the Scots called “fine
weather” was dying down to a breeze that only threatened to peel
your jacket off if you forgot to zip it.
I held Granny in my hand. Every goodbye feels like the first
one and the last one. The craggy, snowcapped ridges of the Cuillin
Mountains blazed white in the distance. Their sun would be our
sun in a moment, but for now the clouds parted only enough to
let thick beams of light shine on the water, as though a lighthouse
were perched in the heavens. It’s guiding the next gust to the shore.
When it came, I opened my palm. A million white grains
shivered as I uncurled my fingers. It is possible to love more even
after someone has gone, possible to grieve them even as we come
to
know them. And it is possible to belong to somewhere by choice
or understanding. We just have
to listen to our heart as it calls us
home. Sometimes it is hard to
hear over everything else.
Suddenly, in a spray of dust that disappeared over the water, she
was gone. Maybe Granny wasn't Scottish, but she would become
part of Scotland. And now part of me would belong here too.
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