The long and winding road ....

Sunshine at last! Time for a drive north to Glencoe where snow is still on the tops and the roads are clear. Love love love it.

My family history seems to indicate that my mother's family were a sept of Clan MacDonald, so I always feel an affinity with this part of the world. It never fails to impress, any season, and though I'm still searching for direct ancestors, the long and winding road seems to beckon and lead me ever onwards to their door ....


From Still Searching


there are hills
wearing now snow caps
now purple dressed,
now dark with rock
poking through
winter-dead growth,
bare and black with rain,
and then again
there is the rough call
of game birds
and the sibilance
of cygnets grown too big
to whisper secrets
to the grave,

secrets
ancient as their own beginnings
held fast in bog
and locked in the memory
of the rock,
it holds my secret -
my unknown forebear
strode that watery path
climbed that heather slope
scaled that rock over there
and lived the hard free life
I see him
his feet summer-bare,
deep in the peat.
I wish he'd turn,
pause a moment
look up
so I could see his face
then I would know the place
and it would know me,
and I would tell myself
I have come home.

Sue