Freedom + Whisky

Dugald reaches a knobbed hand out from his wool to pull the wooden door open, its hinges creaking reminding him to oil it tomorrow; tomorrow when he’s not so tired as he is now.  The corrosive effect of salty air is something he’s still getting used to, even now this half century of years later.  The mud of bogs and peat he knew well as a boy; knew how to eye and avoid a spot that would go deeper than his boots; knew the smell of dark earth, rich for tilling.  But those days are gone.  Now there is only the salt of the air and the fish. 

Sheep now graze the rubble of a home where there was laughter and stories around a hearth, his father holding a dram, eyes lit with story as much as with the embers of the fireside.  Now his hands hold fishing nets, the salt weathering them like the door of this place he hasn’t learned to call home.

Shuffling across the floor, he lays wood in the stove and lights it, hoping that the damp hasn’t ruined his chances of warmth on this fliuch night.  And he smiles, knowing that the Gaelic is still there, tucked in his bosom like a lullaby, like the swatch of his tartan tucked in the wooden chest under his hay-mattress bed; its colors no longer banned but their power lost from what they were when he was a boy of 16, with shouts and smoke and flashes of dirks and swords. 

Pouring a whisky, he remembers that these years since that day have been some of the hardest his people have seen, this robbing of land and identity, of families separated and scattered across a world about which he's only heard tales.  But the fire is still there, its embers perhaps only a glow now in the 70 years his aching frame holds, but still it burns.  And so, he lifts his glass to the land, to his colors, to friends and family gone, to freedom, and to pride, yes, even here.  The colors are not lost, nor the spirit.  “Freedom an’ Whisky” yet gang thegither!