In Luve with Rabbie Burns

Yesterday morning we discussed the great Scottish Plough-Poet, Robert Burns, in my Romantic Brit Lit course. We watched many great Scottish YouTube uploads of Scotland moor images with Dougie Maclean or Michael Marra singing Burns' greatest hits of folk songs. The highland Scottish blood in my veins flowed quickly and sharply when we listened to "Robert Bruce's March to Bannockburn"--I felt my teeth turn sharper, my ears more keen, my eyes more piercing, my hair more red, my biceps and thighs more thick and muscular-like.......I felt like I could jump through a window and rush at the woods even as the Rexburg sky grew colder, darker, and more sinister. I felt like a Scottish werewolf, and I did not like feeling caged.

Long story short, I've been thinking in a Scottish accent ever since (I can't speak it, but even as I'm typing these words, I'm hearing them in as close to a Scottish lilt as my imagination can create), and I've decided to spend the month of August this year in the British Isles, giving a good half of that time to bouncing around the Scottish Highlands.

I've been doing the research all morning and August seems a fine time if I can book a place to stay a few nights in Edinburgh well enough ahead that I don't find myself homeless smack in the middle of the Edinburgh Festival. I'm excited to get lost in the crowds there, and then get lost in the highland moors and get literally eaten alive by midges. I hope it rains banshees and that I only have a few select days of perfect memorable sunny green weather. I want to spend a whole day picnicking at Loch Ness, watching the lake.

I know I've posted Europe trip plans before, but this one is legit. I have a month break between July and September and I plan to use it. Zufelt, can I sleep on your floor a couple of nights in August? I will pay you more than peanuts for the hospitality.

To my Great, Great, Great Grandfather, Archibald Gardner:

I'm going to visit the land of our blood. I'm going to find the castle where your father was wrongfully imprisoned, and I'm going to leave white flowers there out of respect and humility. I'm going to walk the roads you might have walked and stare off into the same rough hills and woods you might have wandered through as you prayed to know if Joseph were a true and living prophet, and if this strange book warranted leaving your country to pursue the Western wilds of America and take on six or seven more wives.

You never returned to your home country, but perished instead after a long, hardy life of running a mill in northern Utah and hiding from the law. I am going to be listening for your ghost winds when I walk along the shores of different lochs and toe the ground looking for treasures around the ruins of old stone walls, old churches, old schoolyards. I hope your spirit walks through mine and that as I sleep on your native soil, I will dream what you dreamt and wake with your thoughts on the edges of my own.

To my ancestors on the MacGilliland side of my genes:

I promise I will do some sort of research on you all before I embark so the Gardner side of me doesn't take up all of my spirit. If you all had been Mormon, maybe you would have made better records of yourselves. Or rather, if you had been Mormon pioneers, maybe I would have been required to tell stories about your lives every year for Pioneer Day during Primary, but as it is, nobody shoved your livelihoods down my throats and I just don't know a plumb thing about you except that one of you hooked up with a Cherokee Indian somewhere down the line.

The least you MacGillilands can do is lead me to your graves or records or something when I'm in your own country. Crazier miracles have happened in the name of genealogy, right? They're in the Ensign every other month.