Hi Calypso

A sweet, earthy smell rose from the leaves crunching beneath our feet as we walked the trail around Royal Lake, and the golden light of the November sun turned the lake into a mirror reflecting doubles of the bare trees, geese, and blue heron. 

About a third of the way around this familiar trek, we noticed something new. One of the homes that backed to the trail had installed a horse fence, and a wee little Shetland pony craned her neck to watch us pass. 

"Are you allowed to have a pony here?" I wondered aloud. "It's awfully residential."

"Let's introduce Lucy," Heidi suggested, and so we made our way up the short spur to the enclosure. An informational sign was posted by the gate. "Her name is Calypso," Heidi read. "You can feed her apples and carrots," she continued, "but not from your hand, because that may encourage her to develop a nipping habit."

"I have some apple slices in my bag!" I said.

"You do?" Heidi was surprised.

"Of course! I packed snacks!"

They Have Those?

We were watching an episode of the most recent season of Shetland the other night. I've written before about the crime procedural drama and how it always inspires us to start planning our trip to those islands in the middle of the North Sea, somewhere between Scotland and Norway. "Your dad is on the road to Aith," one character reported to another, "where the Cake Fridge is."

"Did she just say 'Cake Fridge?'" I asked Heidi incredulously.

The answer was yes. When the main character came to collect his aging father, the old man was eating cupcakes out of a reach-in refrigerator on the side of the road, surrounded by rolling heaths with a spit of the North Sea behind him. "Look at all these free cakes," he told his son.

"You have to pay for them," he was informed. "There's an honesty box."

A quick web search confirmed the existence of cake fridges and honesty boxes for not only cakes, but all sorts of local products on the Island. There are egg stands, seasonal fruit and vegetables, sauces, pickles, and woolen textiles.

As if we needed more reason to book our travel!

Shetland

"Is your peerie lad givin' you trouble?" Detective Inspecter Jimmy Perez asked the wife of a person of interest.

I hit pause. "What does peerie even mean?" I asked Heidi. We were watching the 2nd episode in the latest season of Shetland, a BBC One series based on the classically British crime novels of Ann Cleeves. We stumbled upon the show whilst channel surfing early in the summer, and we have been hooked ever since by the rugged isolated beauty of the land which is mirrored in the rugged isolated integrity of the main character and his team.

So much so, that we have begun planning our some day trip there, with stops in Scotland and Norway, since the islands lie in the North Sea right between the two. But before we go, we have to master the language a wee bit more, do we nae? Peerie? Means small, like the peerie ponies and sheep dogs that bear the name of the islands, and is a synonym for wee, but I'm sure there are some subtle differences that we'll learn when we're there.