So many people to see, so many visitors, so many dinners out. Yes, it’s just four weeks until Craig and I leave Caithness, and the stark fact of it is really dawning on me.
People here have been so kind to us, and the landscape is vast and gorgeous.
We went to a model fair at a local hotel when Craig’s family visited recently, and among all the scaled-down farm equipment, articulated lorries, planes, and boats, there was a table featuring all kinds of buses. When I saw the burgundy Lothian bus, I suddenly choked up.
I used to ride those buses into Edinburgh when I first moved to Scotland 14 years ago. It’s the feeling of those days that fuelled my novel, Idea in Stone.
It’s strange to be going back to Toronto. Exciting, in many ways: work is going extremely well (I’m illustrating a second book for Strategic Coach), I have dear, old friends there, and there’ll be such a wealth of culture for us to explore (it pains me that I’m missing the Toronto Comic Arts Festival by two months; everyone I admire in cartooning will be there).
Sometimes I wonder if it’s giving up, like I didn’t make a go of this whole Scotland thing. But I did achieve what I set out to: even according to “Me-Then”:
