5 o'Clock Somewhere #4

Two countries, two writers, one shared moment. This edition: the Shetland Islands, and Washington

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Busy day? Take a listen here:

Dear NE-One

I’ve been so looking forward to sharing today’s essays with you, the final two in this 5 o’Clock Somewhere series. A few months ago, curious to see how time unfurled in different places around the planet, I asked pairs of writers to sit down at exactly the same time and record the world around them. It was a project to which women gave freely of their time, and I am so very grateful for the perspectives they shared, thoughtfully weaving together ‘ordinary’ moments that would likely otherwise have been lost.

Today’s essays are by two of my favourite writers on Substack: Charlene Storey and Holly Starley. It was 5pm in the Shetland Islands, early evening at the change of seasons, and Charlene, who so beautifully shares insights on creativity and finds delight in everyday magic, was at home; Holly, wonderfully nomadic Holly who writes from the heart and with a voice so distinctively her own, sat quietly in a ravine in Washington.

I knew it would be something special, this collision of time 6,657km apart... take a read through their essays or, better still, close your eyes and listen to their words, read by the women who wrote them.

5pm, Lerwick, Shetland (Scotland, UK)

The light is fading fast and I am mirrored in the glass of the living-room window: curled up on the sofa I am a faint ghost, somehow here and also floating above the road outside. The season has changed, and autumn is evident in the sky more than the leaves. Shetland is largely treeless so the autumnal palette tends to look a little different here; there is a deeper navy to the late afternoon sky, and a sharpness to the air that makes the blueish northern light feel even colder.

Around me the light is cosier; two standing lamps in opposite corners and a bowl of fairy lights in the fireplace cast a glow over books and trinkets. There’s a comforting hush from occasional cars on the rainy street and now and again the wind rumbles in the chimney. The air in here is warm and soft; the cold outside almost feels impossible.

On the table there’s a jug of gently drooping tulips. In some houses the limp blooms would have been thrown away already, but they’ve been here for more than a week. They’re frillier than other tulips, as though they’re in costume and dressed as peonies for Halloween. I like this falling-apart, shrivelling phase of them best of all: the petals are curled and browning around the edges, becoming more sculptural, less floral, the longer they’re there.

The jug belonged to my grandma. It sat on her kitchen table every day at breakfast, the turquoise of the glass turning orange juice into the strange amber-green of a potion. I think of her taking photos of her flowers on a disposable camera – crocuses poking up through the snow, arrangements she’d made, a posy I’d brought her – and of the photos I took of these wilting beauties with my phone.

My grandma is all around this room. Her piano is silent in the corner; there’s a photo of her and her sister as little girls, cut out and glued onto a cardboard stand so that they sit side-by-side, like solemn fairies guarding my bookshelf. There are things she collected in here too: old glass bottles washed up on a beach or found in a forgotten box, a wooden hook for making fishing nets, a small board for stretching knitted hats, and a glass barometer, currently empty.

There’s more of Shetland in this room than I realised, too. Even the large painting on the wall between my bookshelves is of a local place: The Loch That Ebbs And Flows. It’s a sea-loch on Papa Stour, one of the smaller inhabited islands here, depicted at sunset as a chorus of fish poke their heads above the dark water. I always think of them as singing the day to its close, the rings of light around them reflecting that cycle of time.

The sky now has edged into blackness and the room is reflected more brightly in the glass. I see myself again in the reflection, still on the sofa, still curled up but now snuggled in a little deeper, a little less ghostly. A little more fully home.

Charlene Storey is a writer, photographer and teacher from Shetland, the most northerly group of islands in Scotland. On her Substack Haver & Sparrow she shares weekly letters for anyone who likes a hot pink punk rock edge to their slow-ish living along with pieces on memories, photography, and creativity. She is obsessed with storytelling, capturing the little moments of life in words, photos, and art, and buys more books than she can read. Her online book club Rebel Readers is dedicated to women’s stories.

10am, Big Gulch, Mukilteo (Washington, USA)

Wet crackles. It settles into boughs, slides down hemlock trunks, drips like time in wait. Through breaks in the canopy high above, white, only white. A song sparrow calls from the branches of bigleaf maples that hang out over the gulch. A northern flicker gives its signature warning: Flick. Flick. Flick.

My back presses into the camp chair I’ve brought so I can write here, in this grove off a path I know so well. Wetness softens the fallen log behind it, hurrying it back to soil. I raise my eyes again but find no break in the cloud layer, unshapable, muting.

The maple leaves, mustard and rust, are as big as my face. I’ve walked these paths in all seasons and have seen evidence of coyotes and rabbits and of their encounters, and of teens and spray-paint and yews and their encounters. Black-tailed deer have glided out of sight. Spiders have woven glistening, stunning homes. And once, a barn owl sat on a branch just off the trail, not moving, not meeting my gaze.

The laughter of a child bounces off the ravine. As if she’s down there, playing in the river, phantom of the abyss. I think of the Montessori school whose playgrounds abuts this upper trail half a mile farther in; of how sound vibrates particles that vibrate more particles, the wave passed like a baton; and of Charlene on her couch in the Shetland Islands some 4,000 miles away. I imagine I can hear her fire crackling, though I don’t know if she has a fire going or a fireplace even. I imagine her pen sliding across the page, though she might be typing. I see the shore out her window, frothy and bared by wind, though I don’t know how near she is to ocean. I think of how far away and how close we are all at once. How the distance between us is the same distance I drove two summers ago.

A plane passes, low. The growl of its engine is anything but muted. Yesterday, one appeared over the freeway. For some moments, I was directly in its flight path, it coming at me and me coming at it so it seemed we were both holding still. I thought of you then, Charlene, knowing we’d write together. If this was our moment, I’d tell you how the plan’s white, silent belly stirred in me a kind of awe. Or was it longing?

Now, I think of my readers and yours and Narina’s, and of flight pattern maps and how similar a map of our connections across the globe would look. I think of all of you, and I want to show you how this gulch touches suburb and sea. On one end, library, on another, ocean. I can’t decide: is this paradise or torture? The unfathomability, I mean, of words and depths and my hunger and the number of tastes my tongue will/won’t know.

A frog croaks. I feel a giggle rise from my belly. “You’re out early,” I whisper.

Movement beckons. On the trail, I drop to hands and knees. To better see, I move a leaf. The slug’s face disappears inside its body. I didn’t know you could do that. Then it re-emerges. Antennae tasting air, it presses forward.

Holly Starley is a writer and editor who, since 2019, has lived and worked in a ‘self-built, slightly janky, super cozy’ van called Ruby Van Jangles (read more about it here). At Holly Starley’s Rolling Desk on Substack, she writes about life outside the box and our connections with each other and the planet we share.

In a reading kinda mood?

If you missed the previous editions of 5 o’Clock Somewhere here are links that will take you....

To Australia, with

Jan Cornall

, and Bulgaria with

Samantha Childress

To India with

Devayani

Khare, and the with

vienda

Maria

To France with

Gaenor du Plessis

and New Mexico with

April Isaacs