Change of address to https://feastokes.wordpress.com

In a few days it will have been 11 years since we moved to Lewis. How wonderful to feel rooted here now,  how many things have changed and how many things haven't. It seems a fitting time to sign off this blogger site, in favour of a wordpress site at the anniversary of our arrival. I feel a little embarrassed by some of the earliest assumptions I made about the place and people we met, but I am glad to have created a little time capsule of our life changing move.
Find the next 11 year chapter here....!

Life set free again!

Hooray! ITS PROPERLY SPRING AGAIN!
While England seems to have jumped straight into summer, Lewis is throwing off the shackles of winter all at once - the gorse, the daffodills, the grass the lambs - everything is coming out at the same time this year.

I also manage to have coincided my time time off work with the boy's Easter holidays, which is just as well as our first orphan lamb has arrived!

The boys have called him Barry  - I have recorded him as No. 11.

 

As he is the only one so far, I bring him into he house for spells so that he has some company.  He is managing with the laminate flooring quite well, skittering about in his tippy-toes and so long as I take him back to the polytunnel to feed him, he doesn't make too much of a mess...
Hopefully he'll get some pals to play with soon.

Little random flashbacks

Its been 2 years since we were lucky enough to have a fabulous family trip around California, yet today I had a little flashback to being in Grand Canyon 'village' at the post office.  I don't know what was so exciting about it that it logged itself in my memory, I was posting some postcards back home, and I walked along the shopping area to the post office.
The radio was on in the background and I had to ring the bell for attention, prompting a hello and exchange of friendly tourist chitchat while I got the correct stamps.
There were postal boxes in the entrance, for the kids travelling around the country and using them as a forwarding address. It reminded me of getting packages from home when I was working at a summer camp in New Jersey as a teen.  If you're not living at home for a while, how else do you get your mail forwarded from your old address?
I haven't yet identified why I was so taken with the moment, but today, there it was again. The excitement of having real, hold in your hand post, is something that electronic communication will never quite match.

The post on Lewis can be attrocious - only one mail plane comes onto the island a day, so if you put a letter in a post box on, say, a Thursday, it doesn't leave the island until the Saturday morning!  I have a great game I play with my Mum when she posts us birthday cards or presents, where she works out when she posted it and we count how many days its taken to get here - its usually quicker coming onto the island from the mainland than it is going the other way round, but you can never bank on it. It could be foggy at the airport somewhere!

Mark has been working as the local postman for over a year now and is just about to be taken on permanently by Royal Mail. He loves it, he calls it extreme postman-ing. Finally all the driving skills learned green-laning in Wales have paid off.  There is an unorthodox level of other roles involved in being the postman in a remote community like ours too.  Social worker, care worker, tow truck, plumber, cake tester and message-conduit are all part of the job as well as making sure the mail gets through.

The wrath of God

It's a bit late this year, but we're just getting battered by a mild storm today and it really makes you feel like the heavens are against you.
We, as Hebridean's, new ones though we are, soon learn how to hunker down and weather the storm, but the noises of your house whistling and shaking, still do strike fear into our hearts and wonder whether terrible things are about to happen.
And yet, on Monday this week, the daffodils were poking through the soil and spring was coming...
I really don't understand it...how things can change as the week goes on...

And thats great though  isn't it it...

Another funeral in our community

Epitaph
Don't cry for me, I am not gone,
I am the wind on the grass and the corn.
Don't feel my loss, I've not left the land,
I am a billion grains of sand.
Don't think that I've left,  I've gone back to the shore,
I'm in between waves and the ocean floor.
Don't hate this event, unhappy no doubt
It won't last forever, all fires will burn out

Don't cry for long, there's more sadness to come
Regain your humour, you have to be strong
Cry quickly for friends and my family
Who can no longer laugh and talk with me
Then cry for the billions disrupted by war
Dragged from their houses and forced to conform
Heaven is not for us mortals it seems
Heaven exists in our innermost dreams
But if you do one thing. Please do this for me
Make me a heaven on earth, for us 'we'

A sea of people

Gravir church

I was in the congregation at our local church today.
Two of the kindest, most generous and welcoming people passed away together and the church was completely full for them.

The service was mostly in English, but as is normal with the Western Isles Free Church, there was some psalm singing.
I have not heard so many voices joining together to sing Gaelic psalms before and the effect was quite literally moving.
Psalms don't seem to follow the same rules that other group singing has.  It is usually led by someone with others joining in, in what sounds like their own interpretation of the same song.  The pace seems to vary from person to person and people move from high to low notes in different places.  But it literally sweeps you up like waves in the sea.
Imagine wading out into the sea to shoulder height and feeling the rolling waves pulling you in different directions, tugging at you and carrying you off your feet.  This was what being a part of the service felt like today.

When we first moved to Lewis, amongst a sea of new faces, Boy & Maureen stood out.  They were the very first people we met on the day we arrived - they ran the local post office and we stopped to ask directions for the house we were staying at.  When Mark took over as their postman 10 years later,  they became a part of his everyday and over that year they all got to know each other not just as colleagues but as friends too.

They supported every local group and always attended every event.  They talked to everyone, whether about the latest news in the area, or with a heartfelt story from the past.  I cannot think of one person living here who didn't know them.  As Mark said in his own tribute, everything they had, they gave.

They will be very missed when we all finally believe that they are gone.

Halloween in the Hebrides

An important occassion on the calendar, Halloween has become, most certainly, the scariest night of the year in our area.
As my boys have grown older, their costumes seem to have crept closer to the border, from chilling to disturbing. This year, Austin was the butcher of Kershader....

But this is not what makes it the scariest night of the year.  For me, the frightening part is when all the parents emerge from their separate houses and congregate together for the annual Halloween party followed by trick or treating. 
It is always a brilliant night, lots of fun, the kids have the best time ever, running from house to house in the dark collecting bucketfulls of sweets, but the pre-party nerves make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up alarmingly.
(This year Morris peaked too soon, having already been out guising somewhere else the night before, he had a melt down and refused to go to the local party.  A parental nightmare, the indecision of whether to force your child to join in, or let them just be - horrific.) 

Some villages are hyper organised, they plan times, meals, drops off points and are joyous in their togetherness.

My village and the one next door are often at war with each other for a large part of the year, have no communication skills and have the largest amount of children to appease. 
But again this year, it all worked out for the best in the end!

I think the root cause of the Halloween fear, sadly, comes from friendship.

When people are on committees - as they often are here, there is a committee for something nearly every night of the week - people know their roles and purpose and everyone feels generally comfortable with this.

But when we have to go to a 'party', have 'fun' and be ourselves..?  I don't always know where to put myself, so after years of Halloween parties now, I have learnt to just follow the lead... of the kids!

Our children are taught in school how to behave with their classmates to always get along.  They know it is not right to have petty squabbles or take offense at someone else's behaviour just because they are different to us.  They are learning to be tolerant, patient and understanding.  Adults aren't always as well behaved - and ironically in our villages, it is often the adults who are teachers that are the most naughty...

But when you see the kids all running around together, jeering and joking, egging each other on and telling each other off like equals do, it makes you realise us adults are just crap at being friends sometimes.

Never mind - with Halloween night closing for another year, we can now all look forward to the next community occassion - Christmas...!