Home Front

Our plans to spend a few months in Scotland this year are still underway.

I have read four Ian Rankin novels, but I'm ready to move on to Robert Burns in anticipation of his birthday this month, January 25th.  Here is one of his most famous poems/songs, after Auld Lang Syne:

O my Luve's like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve's like the melodie
That’s sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I:
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry:

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.

I plan to move on from there with the brief historical overview in the back of my Lonely Planet Scotland guide, and possibly dive deeper after that.  I recently read a chapter in Women's Work:  The First 20,000 Years, and it discussed a cloth discovered in Austria, woven in a tartan twill.  So fascinating, that the ancestors of the Celts were weaving this type of cloth before they migrated to Great Britain.

On the practical side of things, we have been in the process of apartment hunting and figuring out all the details necessary to be away from home for six months.  I think we now have all our ducks in a row, although it is possible that we have overlooked something.  We shall see.

We have a long list of sites we wish to visit while abroad, which will be so interesting to explore.  A large part of the experience, though, will simply be the change in lifestyle.  When two German cousins visited in August, I saw our lives through their eyes, and it was a bit of a shock.  We rarely go anywhere without taking a car.  There is the occasional walk to get ice cream in the summer months, or to the nearby park with the kids, but otherwise we are very much a part of a car-centered culture.  Where they live in Germany, they bike or walk to many places or take the train.  I look forward to that experience in Edinburgh.

Our first month will be in an apartment near The Meadows.  The rest of our stay will be in a flat in a quiet neighborhood within easy walking distance of many conveniences, near bus stops to take us anywhere we will need to go.  We will be just a short walk from groceries, a post office, and some shops.

Now that we have our housing settled, I feel like I can relax.  I really want the kids to have a comfortable home away from home, a place to settle into so we don't have to feel like constant travelers.  I want that, too.