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A Moment of Émerveillement on the Road to Braemar
The road from Blairgowrie to Braemar climbs gently into the mountains, winding through a landscape that feels both vast and intimate. As we drove, the world opened up around us. A wide, breathless beauty that invited us to stop.
At a viewpoint along the way, my wife and I stepped out into stillness. Before us stretched rolling hills and distant valleys, cloaked in that soft, shifting Scottish light; a kind of quiet majesty that words struggle to hold. We stood there for a while, not needing to speak, only breathing in the silence and letting the moment settle around us.
Then, as if drawn by the same pull of wonder, a French family from Martinique stood beside us. Conversation came easily, warm and light, bridging our worlds. And in that shared pause —, strangers beneath the same sky. We found a kind of kinship.
It was just a few minutes, yet something in it lingered: the wonder of the land, the grace of encounter, the feeling that beauty, when shared, binds us more than words ever could.
As I drove away, I felt like Mary Wollstonecraft who once spoke of parting with newfound friends as a “melancholy, death‑like idea – a sort of separation of soul; for all the regret which follows those from whom fate separates us, seems to be something torn from ourselves.”