Two years ago I learned a new word while reading Mary Holland’s blog NaturallyCurious.: hibernaculum. It’s easy enough to figure out its meaning: a winter covering for a plant bud or hibernating animal. I created my own hibernaculum and committed to spend each January in it more than anywhere else. I hung my maternal grandparents’s Navajo wool blankets on two walls in my study to block the cold. I repositioned my desk so that it got as much sunlight as was available each winter day. I brought in a comfortable chair for reading.

Then, last fall, these plans were disrupted by a black-and-white post card with the skyline of Edinburgh on it. It was an invitation to the wedding of a young man and woman my husband and I  hold in great affection. He happens to be my lifelong friend’s son. I’ve never known a day without this friend, Jenny. I wanted to be there for this special occasion. But their wedding was planned for January 12, 2020 – smack dab in the middle of my hibernation. We were going. I just needed to immerse myself in that part of the world as I would in my study cum hibernaculum. We would not rent a car. Rather, we would walk as much of Edinburgh as possible and then head out a few miles to the country for a reading vacation.  I packed two books Jenny had sent me years ago by a Scottish writer. I’d read them when I received them but wanted to revisit these essays in the country she describes. Plus, the idea of the cold rain falling outside as we sat reading inside sounded almost as wonderful as undisturbed time in my hibernaculum.

Kathleen Jamie is an award-winning poet and essayist who lives in Scotland, not far from Jenny’s home in County Fife. Her essays consider far-ranging topics from the birds and whales, historic sights and personal reflections. All of these essays are deeply anchored in place, in Scotland and that affected my experience there.

Throughout history, Edinburgh, I learned,  was as a center for science, art and philosophy. An essay about The Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh where Jamie describes bottled specimens of human abnormalities from over the centuries made me pause as we wandered past that remarkable building one day. We kept walking, not sure we had the stomach for the “fixed” kidney specimens  she described as “silver threads of mercury fan through the tissue, illustrating its blood vessels. It is quite lovely; one could wear it as a brooch.”

She challenged me to look up, through the mist and rain, at Edinburgh’s weathervanes and rooftops. To see “… the secret, modest things half-hid among the roofs, like animals in a forest.” Out in the countryside, not far from where the Firth of Fife flows into the North Sea, we hill walked and I looked for “the sea the color of tarnished silver…” That surprising morning of sunshine we hiked past ponies in fields with the wind tousling the ponies’ manes and pushing us around. Jamie’s words echoed in my mind: “You are placed in landscape, you are placed in time. But, within that, there’s a bit of room for manoeuvre. To some extent, you can be author of your own fate. At least that’s what I’d been lucky enough to learn.” Me too.

Future travel will include authors more familiar with the area than I because someone else’s observations and understandings of that place brings that place to life in surprising ways.