Natural Improvement, Fast
I took my father back to the island he was born on, the one he left at twenty and hadn't set foot on in over forty years. I told myself it was a kindness. A last look at the place, while he still could. I didn't know, standing on the deck of that little ferry as the harbour came into view, that the island was about to show me exactly what my father had lost across the years he'd been away, and exactly why. By the end of the week, I understood both. My father is called Donald. He's sixty-eight now. He grew up in a fishing village on one of the Western Isles, a single curved row of low white houses along a harbour, a church, a shop that doubled as the post office, and a stone pier where the boats came in on the tide. He left at twenty for an apprenticeship on the mainland, the way nearly every young man did in those years, and he built a good life. A trade first, then a small business of his own. A house with a garden he was proud of. My mother, for forty-one years, until we lost her three winters ago. He always said the island was a hard place to make a living and that he'd never regretted leaving it. But he never quite stopped talking about it either. The names of the boats. The way the light came in over the water in the evening. The Gaelic his own mother spoke in the kitchen. It sat in him like a second language he'd half-forgotten but could still dream in. For the last two years, I had been watching him fade. It came on so gradually that I kept finding reasons for it. He was grieving Mum, and grief makes anyone slow and absent, so that explained a great deal. He was getting older. He was tired. But the words had started to go. He would be halfway through a sentence and the word he needed, an ordinary word, one he'd used ten thousand times, simply wouldn't be there. He'd cover for it. "Pass me the, the thing, you know, for the garden." He began writing everything down. Not in the organised way he'd always kept lists, but in a frightened way: the shop list
