Good Pearls Grow Together

A long long time ago and who can say how long,there was in a faraway land called youth a young boy growing up in the Highlands of Scotland who because of his burgeoning love for a traveller girl,a descendant of one of these people coming from some ancient and broken clan,who travelled with her family the length and breadth of Scotland in the summer months. These clans,ancient in name and history lost their own traditional lands through war or famine,threat or disease and were now represented in these more modern times by individual traveller families finding what livelihood they could from the sources around them and the local needs of the community.
They stayed in Barrakets,a kind of tent made up of bent hazel sticks and canvas and erected in traditional stances that had been home to them for generations. This boy would travel (with the approval of his father and mother back home)with his beloved Rachel who was all that beauty, trust, and love, could offer to a young girl standing near the verge of the beginning of her teenage years. These two were hand and wrist together never too far from each other, ready equally to go fishing for the fine speckled trout in the river's gurgling depths or to do the potato picking with Rachel's parents getting as they did their living from a farmer who wanted nothing else but his fields clear and a good profit after their wage for the day was paid.The other days,the carefree days, they would be somewhere roaming or gallivanting as we Scots say, in say the valley of the Spey and hunting for freshwater pearls that snuggled together in the cold depths of the swift flowing river and were opened without disturbing them for the pearl inside and then a little grit added before the pearl was gently allowed to close again. Grit that would turn magically into a thing of beauty by time and the oysters close embrace and that extra something that would hide a beauty under a rough and battered exterior.Happy days they had then together.Happy days indeed mused the older man and how they blend together i a seamless web. The boy,so soon a man, and now the older man who has moved on that is me and now here sitting with my new and older friends in a day centre in the Highlands of Scotland. I looked up from where I had wandered and around me and thought though times have changed and faces pass away and even my beloved Rachel fell years ago to the ravages of cancer isn't it good how all of us can even with all our diversity make of ourselves a joyful unity with our laughter and our quiet and sometimes light,sometimes serious conversations that simmer and sometimes puncture the air all around us.There are still freshwater pearls to be sought and found, not in the salty water of recriminations and the hopeless accounts of what might have been in the tragic words if only. Hindsight is such a perfect science isn't it for all of us I thought.I looked up from my little book of remembrances which is my mind and smiled at my nearest neighbour,putting my hand out for the proffered cup of tea and said quietly to myself looking appreciatively around me"Here is another group of pearls to enjoy" and with Rachel's secret smile with me always,plunged from my reverie back into the milling conversation.