Category Archives: Big Stone Gap

Beam me over Scottie!

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Jack’s weekly guest blog

Here I go again, a Scots-born American by choice, off to visit the Old Country for a month.

Regular readers will know that I came to live in the US some 11 years past and became a citizen in May 2012. Over here everyone thinks of me as a ‘Furriner’ with an accent so strange I’d have needed an interpreter had my bid for Town Council been successful- not that anyone here has an accent ;0). They also tell odd stories about me not saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

And yet, annually as I go over to my country of birth every year to conduct a small group of folk around Scotland, things have shifted more with each passing year. When I first started doing the tours it definitely felt like going ‘home’ but now it’s much more equivocal – where exactly is ‘home’?

ginnie 2Here in Big Stone Gap I now feel very much at home, and comfortable. The surrounding hills (they call them mountains here, sweet people) remind me of Scotland and the locals have so much Scots blood in their veins that I have no difficulty relating to them. Indeed, these American friends have become the foundation of my life now!

And yet – when I do go back to Scotia/Caledonia/Alba/Scotland/Ecosse it’s rather like boarding a time machine, as I consciously re-calibrate my vocabulary and grammar now that I understand (most of) the differences between American English, British English, and Scots.

So I’m beginning to think, now, of what it is that might actually feel like home to me? Is it a place that shares my politics? Ha! None do. Culture? But I like everybody’s music, dancing and food. It’s not religion, if  ‘good Christian values’ are defended by lying about others – oh no, thank you. I’m tempted to say that living rural does it, but I have very good friends and some truly great memories tucked away in cities.

So, what?

Maybe it’s a combination of the world being a much more connected place now, and me getting older (and wiser?). What got me on this track was a conversation Wendy and I had last night. She will join me in Scotland for a week after this year’s tour finishes and we were talking about old friends we’d want to visit. I found myself looking at this through her eyes and thinking, “Does she feel at home in both places, Scotland and here? Or does  she think of going back to Scotland as a holiday, rather than revisiting our first home?”

So I asked her, and she gave me an enigmatic look. “You’re asking where home is? Honey, human hearts don’t beat with accents. Home is you and me, together.”

Well, yes.WENDY&CAT2

The Monday Book: THREE BAGS FULL by Leonie Swann

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sheep I bought Three Bags Full while visiting my friend Tina’s bookstore PAPERBACK EXCHANGE in Neenah, Wisconsin. Tina’s shop is stuffed like ours with mazes of shelves towering to the moon, and I bonked myself on the head with this book while reaching for another. (No harm; it’s a paperback!)

When a book chooses you, you should pay attention.

Because Three Bags Full is a lot of fun. When their shepherd is murdered, the flock must sort out whodunit, but then they have to get the human herd to understand who, and how, and why. The best parts of the book are when the sheep react in very sheeply ways to things around them. They create a memorial field to their shepherd, but then they eat all the really tasty plants out of it, sheepishly. (Heh, sorry couldn’t resist.)

The language in the book has survived translation very well (being originally in German) and there are some lovely literary passages in addition to the sheep psychology:

“The sea looked as if it had been licked clean, blue and clear and smooth, and there were a few woolly little clouds in the sky. Legend said that these clouds were sheep who had simply wandered over the cliff tops one day, special sheep who now went on grazing in the sky and were never shorn. In any case, they were a good sign.”

That kind of thing. I liked the juxtaposition of what the sheep were thinking within their own limitations–their fear of blood smells, their herd instinct, their natural tendencies to forget what they were doing because of food–but I also liked the casual observations of humanity that were so easy to get, seeing ourselves as the sheep might see us:

“Maple thought optimistically that human beings, on their good days, weren’t much dimmer than sheep. Or at least, not much dimmer than dim sheep.”

Three Bags Full is a perfect beach read for someone who wants a fun, light-yet-insightful book that gives you a pleasant pick-me-up, murder notwithstanding. Two hooves up.