Can you really LOVE a place? I think you can. I think it can happen similarly to how people often characterize romantic love, at first sight. And not in the literal sense. But with the idea that once a place is known, you look back and realize you can’t pinpoint the exact moment it happened or the key that opened the lock, that made you fall in love. You just know, you’ve always been.
That is Scotland for me.
I don’t think it’s perfect or without fault. [Spoiler alert: no place is.] I also think it might not be for everyone. But I do, nonetheless, truly love it.
It started back in 2012 during my first ever visit for
Hogmanay. I must have made an easy mark. Because if you read the post I wrote called
Magical, Mysterious Scotland you wouldn’t be wrong to think I’d lost my head a little. It’s flowery even for me, who usually has no problem waxing poetic.
My theory is this: Scotland actually IS the home of magic, if any exists in our world. It makes its home in the glens, on the mountains [a munro if it’s smaller and a ben if it’s above 4000 feet] and in the bonnie isles of the North Sea where tartan and wool keep the cold at bay and where ‘aye’ can have more meanings than there are types of Whisky. Scotland casts a spell on those who cross into its borders and holds them sway inside a place where nothing seems impossible and where every breath seems somehow sweet. The [people I met here] even have a term for what I’m trying to explain: DSL. Otherwise known as, Deep Scottish Love.
