The watershed

Up earlyish to get to the station. Then a brisk walk around Inverleith Park. Chores and changes planned for later in the day.

I've been reading a delightful book I picked up in the Oxfam bookshop in Stockbridge. It's by Margaret Leigh and called, 'Spade among the rushes'. It is an account of an English woman taking over by herself a derelict croft in Moidart during the IIWW. It was fist published in 1949 and republished by Birlinn press in 2001.

It's a book of a particular type now much in vogue - crushing lemons/grapes/olives on my little farm in paradise - but it has a hard edge and lacks self-pity or glorification.

The last chapters are particularly sharp as Leigh answers questions asked of her and her solitary and spartan life by curious outsiders and city dwellers.

I loved this passage in the chapter, Autumn Days.

'In every year there comes a moment - usually in August - when winter's shadow falls on us; an early intimation, not perceived with any bodily sense, for everything is as it was yesterday, but no less prophetically true. So in our inner lives there comes a day when we realise that henceforward though there still may be growth and adventure, the general pattern will not alter. We can only repeat or, in kinder phrase, fulfil ourselves, for the end is implicit in all that went before. We have crossed a watershed and the streams no longer flow east to the promised land but west to the islands of the blest.' (p.167).

That 'blest' feels a bit uncomfortable to me but I like the sentiment and the way she expresses it with coolness and grace.

I was struck, as I sorted through all my things for the move, by the amount of memories I have accumulated. It seemed as some points as if the memories of what had gone before well outweighed what might be to come.

There is no harm in that. Indeed, the watershed was crossed some time ago. But nonetheless salutary. And that 'henceforward' life's song may be sung at a different tempo and and with an edge of seriousness that was perhaps missing before.