shot, powder, ramrod and pan. Wearing maybe six yards of tartan, he shows how the clansmen pleated their long tartans on belts—belted long or short, depending on the terrain and weather. The leftover length was used as a cloak during cold weather, as hooded cloak when it rained, or it could be slung over a shoulder out of the way and fastened with a brooch. The whole thing could be used as a blanket when sleeping on the ground. Six yards of wool was the rule, and the saying, “the whole nine yards” originated with that particular length.
In The Clans and Tartans of Scotland, Robert Bain writes that the original tartans were dyed with indigenous plants of the various regions of the Highlands and Western Islands. They were woven in simple check patterns. Folk, and the regions of their birth, were identified by indigenous colors and patterns of the tartan they wore. These patterns were carefully preserved by town weavers, who kept wooden sticks with numbered threads for each tartan they wove.
So strong was the meaning of each pattern to its wearer that these became patriotic emblems, eventually provoking their English overlords to outlaw the wearing of tartan by an Act of Parliament. The tactic to defeat this tradition worked because forty years later, when the Act was repealed, there was little interest on the part of the new generation. Knowledge of the correct identifying patterns was lost in the intervening years. It took the interest of Britain’s George IV to reawaken tartan joy in Highlanders. In 1822, nearly 80 years after the prohibition of patterns, the King’s visit to lowland Edinburgh brought a revival of traditional dress. Patterns used were largely recent creations, however.
Allen hefts the musket held out to him. The soldier talks on about fighting methods of the Regiment. A glimmer of reflected light from nearby shadows captures my eye. In the shade of nestling pines I spy baby Kelsey at her mother’s breast: a picture of nurturing grace, yielding forth a quiet spirit.
Allen and I walk to the shore. The tide comes rippling in. We watch spartina grass, bent in the breeze. The view here opens out between long arms of shore, hinting of open sea beyond. An offshore breeze blows upon us, as though a base drone, with smaller fitful gusts as of tenor pipes. The mighty concert of Nature, sun, sea, and shore, all consort to orchestrate these convection currents. I think of the breath of the Piper, whose playing coaxes the Dance. Somewhere behind us, distantly, haunting skirls of the bag, chanter and drone, drift back to us. Through this sounding wind.
Departure
A pale morning outside the window. Light just beginning to show among green leaves. I sat in bed, sipping coffee and reading the fiery Book of Ezekiel. A few days before I had read about the departure of the Glory of God from Jerusalem. Now the prophet was carried in a vision to the New Gate where stood the house of God remade. Looking eastward he saw the Glory of God returning, descending toward him and toward that new temple. “And his voice is like a noise of many waters, and the earth shined with his glory.” Is such radiance after all a feminine attribute, as the Shekinah, the settling of God, has been described?
I looked up from the old words and tried to visualize a sight I would see from the top of Deer Hill Road. I wondered if I might glimpse in some sort what Ezekiel saw . . . if I were perched up there as the sun ascended. Would the green land of hills, and the valley of ponds, be glorified by golden light as the heavenly fire passed on high? Could I gain there a sense of the approximate and feminine Glory of God?
I donned my floppy white hat to keep deer flies off my head, and opened the front door. Then I pushed the bike out, careful to make no sound—did not want to wake the dark old dog, sleeping on trampled and barren dirt, where I had tethered him.
I looked up. One long cloud was moving to diffuse and cover a golden-white sun above the wall of woods edging my neighbor’s yard. A day moving toward the perfection of its shining? Or were clouds on the increase to obscure?
The climbing stretch of hill-country road passed quickly beneath the patterned wheels as I manipulated the multiple gears of the bicycle. This middle-aged strength was fresh in my legs. Roadside things passed in glimpses—laden blackberry bushes in the curve; red limp freshly spray-poisoned dwarf sumac beneath the power lines; a bright sporty car tucked among trees. Feeling sweat flow now, I switchbacked on the steep grade before the big u-shaped house on the flat stretch. Here I passed clots of flowering virgin’s bower, a three-leafed vine mistaken for poison ivy upon our first moving to Maine.
Passing the big house of the Scot, I looked out toward the folds of old hills. Mists lay thickly in those valleys, but it did not shine. The murk of polluted sky with further mountains shadowed from the light. Vapors below met those above in heavy diffusion.
Fireweed, tall and tapering, lit the road shoulders. Now I rolled rapidly down dirt-and-gravel where the road dips before it climbs higher. In damp sand I saw the cloven imprint of the deer, but held on course, steering with care on a sloppy and uncertain surface.
There was Mr. Kaplan’s old connected dwelling, neat as a needle. Across the road was an old stone wall. Here country-cultivated shrubs had grown large and rugged among wildflowers and weeds. Here was a view of empty distance and thickening sky.
The hill ascended steepest here and breathing was heavy, weighted with the oppressive atmosphere. I pushed the damp hat back off my forehead, then found myself off the bike, absently pushing it up hill, switching back, as I had done when peddling. Breathless and sticky, I came to an end of the road proper and looked up a scrubby slope toward hidden moldering old gravestones, spied worn steps among the overgrowth—made of decaying railroad ties. I pulled the bike off road into the bushy birch thickets, climbed to the stone wall. Soon I was seated on cushiony lichen, soft covering of old stone.
Now I looked up toward the great bright globe of gas, the ancient physical source of all we have here. It was hidden among clouds of subtlest gray, but the blessed light of shining pressed through in subdued glory. An elliptical ring of it pierced the cloud roundabout.
I looked toward the valley of ponds but the view was obscured by leafy trees. Yet I saw Swans Ridge out there, elevated above a ravine. A gash below lines of conifer declared the saw of the logger, who had cut the lush covering of Swans Ridge for a developer. There was evidence of that road to Swans Ledge, which I had explored in the spring with the neighbor girls, rising away on my right. Directly across the road from me, ravaged foliage of dwindling summer held on in thick muggy air. Crickets, harbinger of season’s end, chirruped steadily in bushes roundabout, and opposite me a chickadee squeaked. Now heavy silence.
The cloud above Swans was darkening. In vapor above the gashed ridge an elliptical shaping of light slowly overwhelmed the ridge. Diminishing, it seeped out in vague crepuscular rays.
What is the saddest account in the whole of the Old Testament? Is it not that of the departure of the Shekinah from the Holy of Holies? Departure of the Glory from Jerusalem, the city of peace, itself? “Then the glory of the Lord went up from the cherub, and stood over the threshold of the house; and the house was filled with cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the Lord’s glory.”
That was the same house that the worshipers had been polluting. They had also polluted the high places roundabout Jerusalem. “And the glory of the Lord went up from the midst of the city and stood upon the mountain which is on the east side of the city.”
The story which follows, of Jerusalem’s destruction, is one of the most powerful tragedies ever told and, with the exception of Holocaust, and current ongoing Holocaust of today’s Ethnic Cleansing, is perhaps the saddest.
The sky above Swans Ridge, indeed the whole atmosphere over the valley of ponds, was dirty with cloud. The crepuscular rays were gone now. Only a dull crack, the suggestion of light, remained. The sun had vanished.
I stood up and started through brush toward the rotting
