Life Doesn't End at the Top of the Hill

There's a feeling I hear about constantly from women in their forties and fifties, and it never comes out directly. It sounds like: I've left it too late. That was the window, and I was busy. The interesting part has already happened and I wasn't paying enough attention while it did. Underneath all of those is a picture, and I want to get it out into the light. The picture is a hill. You climb, you reach the top, and then you go down the other side. Which puts a woman of forty-eight somewhere on the descent, not because of anything she's done, but because of the shape of the diagram. I've called this series Light Over the Hill, so I've been handing you that shape for nine weeks. This week I'd like to complicate it, and offer two others. The first is the Cailleach. The old woman who made Scotland, striding across the country with a creel of stones on her back, dropping the mountains behind her as she went. Blue-skinned, one-eyed, rust-red teeth, and nobody has ever tried to make her lovely. She rules the dark half of the year from Samhain to Beltane, washes her great plaid in the Corryvreckan whirlpool until it comes out white and lays it over the country as the first snow, herds and protects the red deer, and vanishes at Beltane. Her power and her age are the same fact. And there's a stone house in Glen Lyon where somebody still takes her family out at Beltane and puts them back at Samhain, every year, as far back as anyone can trace. I've also included the part that stops this being a pep talk, which is that she grieves. There's a poem twelve hundred years old in which the oldest woman in our folklore sits down and mourns her own youth in some detail. Both things are true at once. Then the research that has been arguing with the hill for twenty years, and I've given you the contested version rather than the headline, because the shape has been changing and it deserves honesty. What has survived every revision is that none of it is a hill. And the Wheel of Fortune, which floats in the sky with no ground beneath it, because on a wheel there is no summit. The top is a position you pass through. Next week we come near the end, and it's the other side of the Lùnastal episode. We asked then who lit the fire on your hill. Next week, who you're lighting them for. **This week's card:** the Wheel of Fortune. It floats with no ground under it, and the top is somewhere you pass through. **Take the quiz** **You already know. So what are you waiting for?** Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern that's been keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.