Today I feel homesick for places I haven't visited for decades, and for places where I used to live and still dream about. Full of longing. 
Heartlands. Motherland. Bog myrtle, peaty water. Black cows and black faced sheep. Rock pools and pine needles. One car passing per day. Endless machair, endless sky, forestry roads and cattle paths and volcanic rocks. Silence.
The fish van, the meat van. Hughie the Post. The farm family, all their dogs. Warm fresh milk that cooled as you walked it the mile home. My mother's fruit cake. Scones. The cow in the coal shed. The kindling stack. Wet knee'd jeans from walking the glen.
Having a name for every stretch of well known roads. Knowing the passing places off by heart. The adventure of going to the shop, the bigger one of going to a town. Deer in the garden. Huge trees creaking at night in the wind, the river babble.
Ferry crossings, the subtle tweed of the Glencoe valley, the rushing water of the falls. Seals on rocks at the shorelines. Buzzard spotting, counting pheasants, the ghosts that lived in ruined crofts high up in the glen. Silver-white smoke at dusk.
You know where it is, because we all have it somewhere, whatever the landscape, wherever the paysage - adopted or imagined - senses and memories, belonging and be/longings
The light. The light in summer, the light in winter on frosted fields, the light when you reach a long stretch of white sand and the bay opens wider than you could imagine, and the sky rushes in and cloaks you in pale grey white arms.
The bird voices, the water noises, musical, accompanied by wood and wind, the flutter of cymbals as leaves brush, the stories you associate with places you walk past in the dark, as the bats flicker past eating midges that would eat you.
Lichen of every hue, reeds, fallen trees, tiny lochans reflecting clouds, pitted with the faintest rain, no more than a dampness that's touched by gravity until it thickens and falls faster and soaks in and turns you to home, a mile's scramble downhill.
The heat off the Raeburn stove, the old wooden clothes-horse where you put your socks to dry, and the delicious oddness of peeling your clothing off as a lobster takes off its shell, wriggling out, water on the floor, cold feet, skin tingling.
In your pocket, shells, twigs, pebbles, leaves. They mean nothing when you look at them away from their place of discovery, except for striation in the pebbles, white lines, coded messages, and the scent of the leaves until that vanishes.
The best place in the world, because you know it, you love it, you recognise the contour of each hillock and tussock and meandering burn and clump of birch trees and dark still water and cottage and smudge of island and spur of rock and tidal inlet
...and you have no importance to the place, but it has to you, and that's how it should be, you and no conscious self, you alone, but not lonely in that place, you on an adventure, you making the adventure happen, you small person in a special world.
I wonder if @threadreaderapp could unroll or join up this tweet series, people have asked if it's possible...?
