Lotus and script down the spine

The ferry didn't run again on Tuesday, so I have spent three days on the steps of the old chapel copying the characters off the wall for Mr Haldane, who wants them for his book on island scripts. You would laugh at me. My hand cramps after twenty strokes and the ink keeps drying in the heat. But the pattern is patient, and I am learning to trust it. Each glyph sits on the one below like a stack of stones, and whoever carved them never once let a line wobble.

The pond behind the chapel has come up pink this month. Mrs Okonedo says the flower opens at dawn and shuts by noon, and that it grows out of mud without a speck of it on the petals. I sat there with my notebook trying to draw one, and every attempt looked like a cabbage. In the end I gave up and simply watched it unfold, which I suppose is the lesson of this whole island: you cannot rush anything that grows out of silt.

Yesterday I finally asked Mr Haldane what the column says. He squinted at my tracing for a long time, then read it aloud from the bottom up, which he said is how it is meant to be read. It was a single line, a name, and then a word that means something like returning. I did not tell him I had been copying it crooked for a week.

I am sending this with the post boat, so I will stop. Tell Dad the goats are fine. Tell him the lighthouse cat has had kittens in the boathouse and I have claimed the grey one.

Love, Margaret