AT THE END OF MARCH, I was sitting at a departure gate at JFK, having endured a brutal frigid winter exiled upstate in a yurt in the woods, about to fly to Tokyo to bury my maternal grandmother, when I got a strange and unusual email. From a woman, Kirstie, who said she lived in Scotland, on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and that she wanted to fly me out and feed and house me for two weeks over the summer solstice.