A morning in October, the day after I turned sixty.
But I’m like that six-year-old who wakes early to see the sea. We’d arrived the night before in darkness, had been on the road eleven hours with stops. It’s barely light when we leave the holiday cottage. Baillie pulls me through the narrow street up the hill. Centuries-old dwellings packed shoulder to shoulder, wearing the weather and all their colours like familiar garments.
Here’s a fat hissing cat, here’s Baillie's loud response and all the while this salt-laden, insistent rain. I’m worried about slipping on crooked stone steps rising to wherever; have I got enough dog poo bags, and where are the bins? I hadn’t meant to fall in love - wasn’t that what I’d warned myself against? Yet here it is. Profound. And rising like a flood through the cracks of ordinary experience: recognition. Home. I feel at home here in Mevagissey - despite this rain and holding Baillie's lead while he tugs me with one hand (the other busy with the unglamorous rituals of dog ownership.)
We might speak of place-attachment as something cultivated, grown carefully. But sometimes it arrives like a remembered language, recalled from some older memory. But this morning, really? I’m not seeking significance, am I? (Is that why it has found me?)
And now we’re back in the cottage, and I’m sitting at the table writing this. I can hear a hundred gulls and a million pins of rain on the windows, M stirring from sleep, Baillie washing his leg.
Back in Cumbria I’ve been making a community archive, gathering stories, a conscious preservation of place that's become its own kind of meditation. I’ve brought Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost to Cornwall. There’s a passage I keep returning to: “Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.” Sitting here this morning, the meaning of it clicks. It’s the very act of making the archive, of documenting it with writing, audio, photographs, that has created space for this other knowing to surface. Could it be that my conscious work of preservation has loosened something deeper? My mind's eye conjures tide out, rock pools revealed.
In the language of recovery and therapy, we speak of ‘pulling a geographic,' a belief that a change of place might transmute into a change of self. I know this narrative well. I’ve seen how external movement often masks internal restlessness, like waves mistaking their own motion for progress while deeper currents remain unchanged. So I hold these feelings carefully. I’ve never done a fire walk, but I imagine the embers now. They’re warm with potential, yet capable of scorching if I linger too long, testing whether this is escape or recognition, running from or walking toward.
Baillie puts his paws on the window ledge, looks out, looks at me.
When are we going out again?
But I head out alone to buy breakfast pastries for M and me. And take a detour past an estate agent’s window.