my Scottish granny

Meet my Scottish granny! To be honest, I don’t remember much about Grandma McKay, but I know that she took my father in when he arrived from the Caribbean as a teen only to find his stepmother didn’t want him in “her” home. She taught my mother to make Yorkshire pudding and she knit me and my siblings cardigans in different colors—mine was bubblegum pink, which might explain why I lost it in K-mart when I was four or five. I’ve had Scotland in my thoughts for the past few years. When I was working on my family memoir, The Hummingbird’s Tongue, I found the journal of an 18th-century Scottish lady who visited St. Kitts-Nevis. Scotland has recently been examining its ties to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and I unsuccessfully applied for a residency designed to explore the interwoven histories of Scotland and the Caribbean. I have another residency application on my desk, but decided not to wait for an invitation to cross the pond. I leave for Edinburgh in a few hours and am looking forward to meeting educators and students at two local schools where I’ll be giving book talks. On Thursday I head to Glasgow for the first time (I visited Edinburgh in 1991 as an exchange student) to talk all things kid lit with Prof. Evelyn Arizpe and author/doctoral candidate Elizabeth Dulemba. And on Friday I’m on the closing panel of the SYP Conference: Publishing v. the World. Then I come back to Brooklyn—and then I have some tough choices to make. I was in Washington, DC last week for the NEA’s Read Across America launch, and I was reminded once again how much I like DC. After having dinner with two local friends, I started thinking seriously about giving up my apartment here in Brooklyn. I’ve been here over ten years—largely because my landlord is my friend who keeps the rent below market value. If I left, she could renovate and raise the rent, and I could start a new chapter in a new city. It would be hard to leave behind my NYC friends and professional contacts, but there are so many youth-serving organizations in DC…lots of Black history, pleasing architecture, good public transit, and DC is a walkable city. Maybe Scotland will sweep me off my feet and I’ll see if spending the summer there eases my restless spirit. But I need a change…