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'