solanoire

One of the good things about having an impaired memory is that each season is new. This is my sixth spring since the concussion I haven’t fully recovered from, and my sixth successive spring here in Lochinver, but it could almost be the first.

It’s not that I don’t remember last spring but it feels so far away that it’s as if it happened years ago. I do have some feeling of familiarity: as I walk along the slim path beside the river, the intense green glow of the young beech leaves in the evening sunlight arouses a sense of recognition, of greeting, but it’s faint and indistinct, like the memory of something once loved but long gone, and difficult to firmly recall.

I walk on, following the path until it reaches a bend in the river and falls into shadow, then turn back. Now the sun is in front of me, low in the north-west. Its golden light is filtered through the varied arboreal foliage generating green hues of vivid tenderness. I stop in a copse of beech trees and soak it up: a sweetness of light, and a sweetness of flavour too as I pluck a handful of the smaller leaves and fold them, one by one, into my mouth. Each leaf is soft and downy on my tongue and as I bite down, a subtle succulence is released. This feels more familiar, as if the tongue’s memory is more faithful than the eyes’ and I’m reassured to know that my body holds what my mind can’t easily access, although, I tell myself, what matters is what’s present now.

I stroll a few steps further then am stopped by a rowan, its emerging fistfuls of leaves brightly backlit, their serrated fringes casting finely-toothed shadows on each other as they layer and overlap in their open field of light. It’s the mosses which captivate me the most, however, covering the rocks by the path and the larger boulders alongside, thousands of tiny hairy fingers thronging upward in silent solar supplication. They seem to glow of their own accord, as if they’re not reflecting light but emitting it, and those in the shadier pockets of the wood appear almost phosphorescent.

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

Despite my disrupted memory of recent years, I still remember this stanza of a poem* we studied at high school: each summer the last summer, each moment the last and only of its kind. In my case, now, it’s the inverse: each season the first season, each spring the first to generously and gladly unfurl. I don’t think it matters though. It’s the gratitude which counts.

*Living by Denise Levertov

River Inver, Assynt, Scotland
8th May 2026