Ben

Walking the middle road with my son to Port Glasgow. The sun out, honey sweet on our faces. We are trying to keep perfect circles on our tongues. And look: the Clyde is blesséd blue, a shaken out shimmer carpeting the firth below us. Buzzards turn overhead in spiralling drafts. A heron up-sticks and flies. Redwings and mistletoe thrushes poke across the crunch of grass still in shadow. Rooks and jackdaws paraglide to a tree, craw-crawing and sparking flint.
At the top of the climb we stop. The chill burns as the sun warms. Here we saw the aurora borealis together one night and at this very point we hugged and danced and shouted. Here today we see Ben Lomond in its fine shawl. My son is named for it, and he is my carrier this day: the camera, the binoculars, the water we share.
The snow on the mountain takes me to the time I was descending it when it was like this, down Ptarmigan ridge. I stepped and startled the white beneath my boots. The snow took the form of a ptarmigan right there on Ptarmigan ridge. It moved a little way off until we passed. Then it went back to its perfect white. A name, a bird, a colour, a ridge all locked in my heart beating right here.
"I've broken the circle," my son says.
I look over at him, then at the mountain and ridge beyond and stick out my tongue and show him the thin white o I have kept. Steam rises from my tongue and I bring it back to the warm cavern of sensation I am wrapping myself in.
Above us the buzzard glides and rises: over there on Ptarmigan ridge white moves on white. I hold onto this perfect circle a while longer, then crunch. We start our descent.