Author: Denise (Sunshine Coast, Australia)
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Categories: [awe]  [reflection]  

I think it was always hanging there, above the kitchen door. It had a gold frame that had broken when it fell after I had once slammed the door. It was mended with sticky tape and it was really just a magazine photo that she had framed, the glass was cracked in the lower left corner. It looked so out of place, how could it not, this photo of an aged castle on a loch and those green, green hills, resolutely taking pride of place on a fly-spotted wall in outback Queensland.

The other pictures around the room were of prize cattle and mustering and a there was always a Calliope Station calendar that would flutter and rip in the hot summer breeze. I don't remember asking her what the castle was; I just always knew it as "Grandma's Castle". The one she had left behind when she came to Australia. I couldn't really understand why anyone would leave all that green grass and water to move to this hot, quiet, desperate place. Of course I suppose I always knew it wasn't really "her" castle, but that she had played around it as a child. It had belonged to some cousin whose name she had forgotten. She spoke a lot of Scotland then, of how she had wanted to go back to visit, but the chance had never come and now at 95 she was too old.

I said I was going to Scotland for her. When we got the UK I made a beeline for this place. As we stopped along the way I sent her postcards cataloguing our progress. Then we came around the curve of the road and there it was, larger than life, and far more majestic than it ever was on the dining room wall, my Grandma's castle.

Other submissions by this author: :  My arm is aching  :

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