Heartbeat line and family script on a foot

The rain has finally stopped, so I have been out on the curtain wall at Kinnaird with the rubbing paper and the charcoal you sent me for Christmas. Mr Rennie from the council says the walls will fall down by the end of the decade whether we record them or not, so I am doing it the slow way, one stone at a time. Yesterday I found a lintel above the old postern gate with a row of notches cut into it, peaks and valleys, like the trace the nurse at the surgery showed Mum on her chart. I thought at first it was a mason's joke. Then I counted nine peaks, and beside them someone had scratched a little heart with a tail that ran straight into the first notch.

Grandad said the Rennies and the Macleods used to tally births and burials on the gatepost with a knife, one cut for each soul, so nobody could argue about who belonged where. I sat on the wet step and thought about you out on that boat with your hands in the bilge, and whether you ever count us that way. I know you don't. You never were one for writing. So I have made my own tally on the back of this envelope: one peak for you, one for me, one for Mum, and a long flat line for Dad, who would have laughed at all of this and then asked what the lintel was worth.

The stone is going to the museum in Inverness on Thursday, though I asked them to leave the notches where they are and to put a card beside them saying who made them. The man from the museum did not write anything down, but he nodded at the word I had copied in the corner of the rubbing, the one the weather has nearly taken, and he said it was Gaelic for hearth. I told him that was a fine word for a gatepost.

Come home at Easter, and I will show you the nine.

Love, Isla