Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Today I have a heater to buy.
The boat shed’s going to be cold by October, that much I know. Hell, it’s probably cold already since summer in the Highlands has, so far, been more of a suggestion than anything. I’d been putting off the trip to Fort William like I put everything off that I need to do. I told myself I needed some time to get my bearings and figure out what I needed to buy, what’s missing from the cottage, etc., before taking the two-hour journey to the nearest big town.
But now it’s no longer something I need to do, but want to do. I want to be somewhere else. Somewhere away from here. Somewhere with parking lots. Somewhere with people who don’t know my name and don’t whisper it through the fucking door.
I get ready with purpose, put on jeans—instead of pants with an elastic waistband—a cozy cardigan, and my boots, then I get in the car.
The drive south is the kind of drive that reminds me why I wanted to move out here in the first place.
The cloud burns off in the first hour. The road slips out of the fern-laden coast and into a country of long pale lochs and bare, scoured mountains, where the rock comes through the heather like bones through skin. I crack the windows. The wind smells of grass and water and woodsmoke from a place I can’t see. I drive past flocks of baa-ing sheep, past a single white house at the head of a glen with no road to it, past a stand of birches the color of cotton candy in the new sun.
By the time I cross into Lochaber, the sky has gone wide and properly blue. I’ve got my cardigan pushed to the elbows. The radio finds a station out of Inverness playing something tinny and cheerful, and I sing along badly to whatever I can catch the chorus of. The mountains here are bigger and emptier, the kind of country where the road feels apologetic for being there at all, like humans bravely dared to mark it. I haven’t thought about Alasdair at all. It’s its own small victory.
Fort William is bigger than I expected—which shows just how isolated I’ve been—and the carpark for the big supermarket at the edge of town is the closest thing to a sensory assault I’ve had in a week. I get a propane heater, the kind hunters use in unheated cabins, along with a spare bottle for it.
Then I tackle groceries, going down my half-finished list. Frozen pizza. Two bags of crisps in flavors I can’t quite trust like shrimp and curry chicken but sound like a good experiment. A box of cereal with a hare on it but looks like it has tiny marshmallows, so that’s a win. Microwave rice. A bag of small clementines I’ll eat enthusiastically for a few days and then forget about until they go fuzzy in the bowl. Pre-cut cheese. Pre-cut anything, really. A jar of pesto, because pesto plus pasta—and chunks of halloumi—is a meal I can put together quickly, providing I set a million timers for the pasta so I don’t let it turn into a mushy mess.
The pretty girl at the till with wild blue hair and a septum ring scans my haul, notes that I’m a tourist by my accent, and, given my grocery haul, gives me a small kind smile that says I am not going to ask about your life. I take it because I swear I’m this close to oversharing what happened last night with a total stranger. God, I really need to talk to someone. I’d give Maddie another call but I feel I need to make her proud before I do and telling her that I got off while secretly watching my naked neighbor masturbate is not a thing I’m proud of.
The drive back is the same drive in reverse, but a different country entirely. The clouds are gone. The lochs have switched from slate to a hard, glittering blue. The mountains across them are clearly mountains now and not the suggestions they were this morning. I pass a man on a bicycle in shorts, which in Scotland is the equivalent of seeing someone in a swimsuit. Somewhere south of Lochcarron I have to pull onto the roadside to shrug my cardigan off because the car has gone genuinely warm.
I drive the last half-hour in my T-shirt with the windows down, the wild wind in my face, and the sun making everything kind.
I pull up to the cottage with the sweater on the passenger seat and my arms bare. The bay is a sheet of beaten silver. The rowan at the front step is rustling in a small warm wind. The cottage looks almost like a postcard of a cottage rather than the cottage itself, and, for the first time since I got here, I can’t help but think how lucky I am to be here at all. It’s amazing what summer weather can do to one’s soul.