The Inheritance of Three

My life keeps assembling into threes.

I plant in threes. I make artworks in threes. And this is my third piece where I hold memory close. This is the closing panel after Can I Sit With You and The Taste of Grief. Three pieces now, and I did not plan it that way. I never plan the threes. They simply emerge, and I recognise them afterwards, the way you recognise a face in a crowded station.

My father was a third son. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. A polymath. A linguist. A man who loved the expanse of nature, especially landscapes like the Cairngorms, where he grew up. He moved between languages the way other men move between rooms in their own home, without hesitation, without needing to think about where the light switches are. His love of landscape, trees, plants and birds passed on to me. A legacy that still gives me pleasure as I write, photograph and garden.

For his seventieth birthday I gave him a silver birch. I chose her myself, at a garden centre local to me. She was about a metre and a half tall, carefully folded into my car and driven to our family home. Her crown was pressed against the window, like a small child with sticky finger prints, anticipating an adventure. Her roots were wrapped in damp hessian on the back seat. I did not know much about trees then. But I knew, instinctively, that silver birches meant something to us. Years later, in the Cairngorms, I saw their delicate beauty in situ framed against expanse and ruggedness. I had given him back a fragment of the ground he came from. I did not know it at the time. That is how simple gifts work. They know more than the person giving them does.

It was my father who gave me my first copy of On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. A book I still return to. He gave it to me when I was fourteen, years before I would need it. This was the foresight of a parent. Not a warning. A map, folded and passed across the wood grained kitchen table without ceremony. He never named the journey it was destined for. He simply made sure I would have the time to assimilate it, that I would not be walking without light. I curled up in an old armchair, and absorbed words that would become a compass I am still steered by.