With a storm coming in and dusk approaching, I decided to squeeze in a winter hike today. And as I headed back down the mountain with cold drizzle blowing into my face and the grey winter grass moving in the wind, I smelled woodsmoke from someone's fireplace and saw lights in a house in the distance, and had an incredibly visceral sense-memory that inflamed my romantic notions. If in fact reincarnation exists, then surely I was in a previous life a Scottish lass, racing across the moors towards some fine castle to beat a storm and rush into the country kitchen where a fire crackles on the hearth and wild pheasant is being plucked by a jolly plump woman in a white apron. I imagine my hair flying wild and my cheeks flushed, perhaps an Irish Setter bounding out before me, a mixture of Kate Winslet rushing to Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, a scene out of Wuthering Heights, and a Lands End advertisement (though mainly because I imagine myself wearing wellies beneath my dress and flying wool cape). 

As I was getting caught up in this feeling, an owl flew past me in the darker and drizzlier sky and alighted on a tree branch, heightening the whole effect, and I was reminded of scenes from St. Agnes' Eve, the lovely and dramatic poem by John Keats:

St. Agnes’ Eve—-Ah, bitter chill it was!
    The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
    The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
    And silent was the flock in woolly fold...

Meantime, across the moors,
    Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire
    For Madeline...

Would that I were rushing to my love across the moors! Alas, the sensory illusion dissolved when I got back in my Volvo to rush over asphalt back to a pile of bills and a sink of dishes, but the feeling lingered, and I love knowing that I carry this person or people inside, these ghosts of my fantasy who surprise me with their Proustian Madeleine (or Keatsian Madeline) moments.

 

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