Pair of angel wings line drawing

The ferry didn't come on Tuesday, so the post has sat in the back of Hamish Lowrie's shop for three days, and I have decided to write this out by the stove where it's warm and let it go with the next boat, whenever that is. You'll want to know about the wings first, I expect, because you always did say I'd never finish anything without a lamp lit under it.

Dad finished them the week before the funeral. He'd been carving the frame from the driftwood that came in after the February gales, two long arms of ash bent at the top into curls like the end of a fiddle scroll, and then he pinned the feathers on one at a time. Gull and fulmar mostly, and a few dark ones from the shag that nests under the old pier. Each feather he laid so its tip pointed down and its root tucked under the next, so the whole thing looked like it was falling and holding still at once.

I hung them on the nail above the chapel door, because nobody on Scarra would take them into a house. Mrs Gunn says they are wrong, that wings should be on a body, not on a wall. I told her a wall is a body too, if you stand long enough beside it.

They're still up there. The wind comes through the gap in the door and lifts the lowest feathers, and every time it does I think of him saying he'd fly them over to see you in Glasgow, and how he laughed at himself for saying it.

Write soon. Tell me if the rain there has stopped.

Love, Ellen