November

November is always such a strange month for me. In the past, I used to write off November as a non-work month; my body just took way too long to adjust to the shorter days. I moved to Scotland from California, and life in both summer and winter is way different closer to the 57th parallel north. I used to spend most Novembers bundled up in bed trying to coax myself out of it. But it’s been 11 years, and I’m finally growing used to the extremely short days of winter, and the extremely long days of summer, and finding joy in both.

In November-January the light is at its most beautiful (an entirely subjective sentence, of course!) and the landscape is often awash with gold. The autumn leaves are mostly gone now, but the trails are still covered in rose hips, haws, sloe, and guelder-rose fruit. Basically: many, many autumn-coloured fruits that are not terribly good for nibbling, but good in jams and teas.

And in other delightful news, one of our farm fields is hosting a small herd of sheep for grazing. Our living room faces the field, so I watch sheep antics as I write (they do flee from many things, including crows and pheasants), and sometimes they come up to the fence and watch me.

In any case, these are all very strange and amusing things for me to write about. Mr. May and I traveled often to less populated locales in Scotland whilst we lived in Edinburgh and enjoyed dipping in and out of farm life, but my husband always insisted that we were extremely city people. I disagreed and insisted that we were two country people who — for one reason or another — had been forced to settle in cities. And as fate would have it, a job opportunity came up near our farm, and here we are a year and a half later and…

And he loves it! Ha ha! I’m vindicated! 🙂

As always, I hope you enjoy the photos.

More later, much love,