Over the Hogmanay Threshold

~*~

The wind soughed over the Scottish heath, rattling the gorse and seeking purchase in any empty heart. Agnes Milton settled into her snug little cottage, ready for her solitary Hogmanay celebration. With her only sister long since moved away to Aberdeen to marry and her parents gone to rest, there really wasn't anyone for a spinster like herself to celebrate with. But she kept the traditions, and she credited that with the neat and ordered pace her life took. If a knock on wood or a pinch of salt thrown over the shoulder was all it took to guarantee order and peace, then Agnes would do it. The Spinster Milton was the most superstitious woman in the whole county, perhaps in all of Scotland.

Agnes ate her dinner of salt pork and beans in slow and careful bites and thought with pride of her shrewd preparations. Her animals, a single heifer and a small handful of chickens, were well fed and bedded down. The weavings of ivy and wheat stalks, twisted and woven by her own hands, were tacked over every door and window. Her debts, small though they were, had been paid, and she would not drag the shadow of debt into a clean new year.

But the most important preparation of all, the one that made Agnes smile the most at the thought of it done, lay biding time outside her door, waiting for the stroke of midnight. It was a small, sturdy basket filled with such things to bring her luck in the coming year. There was a little bannock cake to ward against hunger and a trio of shillings against monetary want. There was salt to bring flavor and a wee dram of whisky for good cheer. And tied around the sturdy little basket's handle was a length of butcher's string she'd saved from the pork she'd cooked that evening. Agnes would use the string to draw the basket across the threshold and draw the luck into the coming year.

Of course, she would have rathered a tall, dark-haired man for her first footer, but drawing a basket across the threshold would have to do. It was certainly better than risking the want that the bad luck could bring upon her by the first crossing of the threshold in the new year being out instead of in and by a woman, to boot. That would just not do.

Her dinner finished, and dishes washed and put away, Agnes settled down in front of her fire and took up her knitting needles to while away the hours before midnight. The wind still keened over the heath and occasionally gusted down her chimney to tease the cheerful flames in her hearth. Some said that the wind over the Scottish heath was enough to drive one mad, so lonely and aching it was, but Agnes was a child of the heath and found nothing but comfort in natural wails that had lulled her to sleep every night of her life. She finished the scarf she was working on just shy of eleven o'clock. She wove in the ends and folded it neatly, thinking perhaps she would sell it to the next tinker who came through town or perhaps trade him for sewing needles or some pretty ribbons.

Agnes frowned at the clock and adjusted her spectacles. There was not enough time to finish any project before the midnight hour, and bringing unfinished business into the new year would be terribly unlucky. So, she settled down to wait, her hands folded neatly in her lap. Agnes Milton was very good at waiting. She'd been doing it for most of her life.

Her tabby moggie, Barleycorn, leapt into her lap, seeing it empty and her hands idle, a rare occasion in this cottage. He purred as Agnes stroked him. Perhaps it was the purring that lulled her to sleep, or it was just that she had been up with the dawn, as she usually was, to tend the many things that needed tending about her little croft. But when the clock struck midnight, it found her snoring. Agnes did not wake until a quarter of one, when Barleycorn decided it was time to prowl around the cottage.