Lotus and unalome line design

The path up from Skerra Cove has gone to nettles since you left, but Mam still insists on walking it every Sunday with the good shears in her coat. She says the switchbacks were laid by the monks who kept the chapel, so a person climbing with a full basket can stop and turn round before the wind takes the breath out of them. I think she believes it. I have started to believe most things she says about that hill.

At the top, where the path gives out into the bog, there is a pond the size of a kitchen table. Nobody planted anything in it. Last month a single white flower opened in the middle, its petals pointed at the edges as if someone had folded it from paper, and the gulls have been circling it ever since as though they expected it to speak. Mam called it a sign. Mrs Haddow called it a weed. I knelt in the wet with the camera you left behind and took eleven photographs before the light went.

What I wanted to tell you is that the path does not end at the flower. Below the pond, where the stones come down to the harbour, there is a line of small cairns, each with a bit of sea glass set on top, and Mam has been placing them since February. She will not say why. Yesterday I counted nine of them and a tenth stone with no glass on it, waiting.

I have not moved it. Come home at Easter and bring the green piece from the wreck that you keep in your tin. I think she has been waiting for you to finish the path.

Love, Ruth