And as the light continues to fade, the scent is intensified, and it is lovely to walk across the croft fields on down to the shore, breathing deeply and sighing with pleasure as you go.

And yesterday evening, as I did so, the rising sappy scents were intensified and not brushed away by wind. Too cool for many midges, it was a soul uplifting potter. Large grey, lichen covered and thrift tufted boulders had turned to copper and bronze, machair to gleaming gold, but the sea, ah the sea, was smoothed and polished: like the moonstone of my childhood. In such light, the land and all its creatures raise eyes, hearts, stem and leaf to the sun and his panoply of triumphant military reds, oranges and pinks, but thesea, on this evening, the sea called to the moon even in her absence, as if yearning for her pale, blue, mercurial, singing light. The ocean had become my moonstone.

Machair grasses are tipped with red gold and Skye blurs to purple across the moonstone sea

Like liquid quicksilver but more redolent of my moonstone memory, the Inner Sound glows

So I remembered my ring last night, as I looked out across the shimmer of sea, and I remembered my mother, who sang songs of love and loss, as mothers do.

A singing moonstone sea, framed by the peach melba ocean haze of the setting sun

And just as I felt a rising of sad rememberings, a gentle whistling call travelled across the little storm beach with its piled-high stones and through the