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20110303-across-from-the-castle-by-lindsey-crittendenThe stones are gray and sandy brown, scoured and pitted and cracked by time and salt air. During my week here, the sky stays a pale, cold blue. The North Sea is surprisingly calm. Long diagonal ridges of rock—craigs, the Scots call them—expose themselves like bony spines at low tide and slip underwater at high.

I knew a young man—one of my nephew’s closest friends—who jumped last summer onto those rocks, from the castle tower across from the window where, each morning, I take breakfast.

The host at the B&B, a former US Navy pilot, makes me oatmeal and coffee and, each morning, announces the temperature, wind speeds, and tides. It is late January in Scotland, so the air temperature hovers in the low 30s.

When I walk on the beach—or, as they call it here, the sands—I warm up enough to take off my gloves and unzip my parka. The light here has a bracing quality, and also a softness. In late afternoon, it warms the sand-colored stone as I sit at the window in the late afternoon.

I don’t golf or drink whisky, as suggested by the immigration officer at Heathrow when he read my landing card. I am not on holiday, although I had planned a vacation in Edinburgh ten days from now, when my nephew and I would meet up for his university term break.

There will be no term break; I’ve come to bring my nephew home.

He hopes otherwise. He asks for another chance. This time will be different. He’s learned his lesson. I’ve heard it before. We spend three days doing a dance in which he lays out the argument, the reasons, the tears, and I repeat the facts. You did not go to class. You did not do the work.

It’s a strange thing, to travel 6000 miles to spend five days with no agenda other than repeating yourself to an adolescent. I read student work. I read. I go for walks. I find a comfy café. I write emails. I do a lot of math in my head, either subtracting eight (hours, for phone calls home) and multiplying by 1.6 (to convert prices into dollars).

And, in the image that returns to me most vividly when I get home, I look out at a crumbling castle and a vast North Sea.

The words “It’s over” finally get through. The low point of the trip comes a few hours later, when—my nerves and patience and good will frayed—my nephew tells me I am cold and withholding.

Snap.

Later that night, I sit on a curb outside the castle grounds (cell reception from the B&B is spotty, and I get a good signal only when I’m outside), and sob into the phone. Six thousand miles away, C calms me down. Or tries to. He listens, which is the next best thing.

The better thing, really. I am due a meltdown. Sheer exhaustion, you might say—and I think, Yes, shear, like a wind shear, like I’ve been sheared, my protective woolly layer gone. Because bringing my nephew home means bringing him home. And then what?

One day at a time, C reminds me. The serenity prayer.

The next morning, I log on to emails of simple support from two of my closest friends, parents themselves. From C’s mother. Over breakfast, I confide in Linda, the Navy pilot’s wife. She murmurs, nods. “Yes. You’re doing the right thing.” One of their daughters, it turns out, spent a semester driving five-hundred miles every weekend to go line-dancing. Now she’s doing great.

I’ve turned a corner. Getting the message through to my nephew is part of it, of course, but not all. I feel held, less alone. So, when, ten days after my return, I read a meditation accompanying the Collect for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, in a book of Collects by Thomas Cranmer, I stop.

The Collect beseeches God “that they which do lean only upon hope of thy heavenly grace may evermore be defended by thy mighty power.”

The meditation comments: “‘Only’ is the key word…the only ground on which to place our weight, the only foundation strong enough to take the full burden of all we hope to become as well as all we hope to have forgiven, is God’s grace.”

Okay, but here’s what caught me: “Would you not rather spread your hopes around, at least a little, if only for the sake of insurance? Put at least some hope on your children, or on your friends, or on a Bach fugue or magnificent sunset, for that matter?”

Better not, the meditation concludes. Only God’s gift—from outside ourselves, from outside the human condition—takes the burden away. What human beings bring, the writer states, is always flawed. Nothing we do or can do is perfect.

True. C’s steadiness as I sob, huddled in my wool cap and down parka on a curb on a moonlit street in late January, isn’t perfect. Neither are my friends’ emails, or Linda’s words. Human beings are flawed—but isn’t that the point? That we suffer, and we make mistakes, and we lean on each other. God’s grace may be perfect, but sometimes I need more.

Back home, the acacia is exploding, the plum trees and tulip magnolias opening into pink, the mustard blanketing fields in yellow. I have a cold. I sleep nine-hour nights and nap in the afternoon. I eat too much sugar.

My nephew returns in a few days, and another challenge will begin. Scotland feels far away. I keep seeing that castle wall, buttery yellow in the afternoon light, and saying a wordless, heartfelt prayer.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: Lindsey Crittenden

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