Earth Mothered
Once upon a time, an ex-Navy ex-bad boy married a barefoot, hippie, California girl who wanted to unschool her kids. They had two perfect children, one boy and one girl, to replace each of them on the earth, and raised them in an ex-vacation cabin in a redwood forest where clothes were always optional (for the children at least) and the hummus flowed freely. The young father’s Catholic family looked on with a kind of scandalized approval. “The earth mother” they called his wife. She did yoga, hugged trees, practiced homeopathy, breastfed and wore her babies, and had been a vegetarian until she got pregnant. She studied anthropology and early childhood education in college, and put both to use traveling from school to school doing presentations on the First Nations Peoples indigenous to the region, while her bright-eyed firstborn took it all in from the safety of her forest green sling.
The baby grew up on a steady diet of beach sand and farmer’s market produce and sunshine. She played naked in the rain, waded in the creek, ran through the meadow at twilight when the Four O’Clocks bloomed, chased sea gulls and sand pipers and learned how to spot hermit crabs in the sand. Her mother saved her placenta and helped her plant it with a eucalyptus sapling when she was three and could appreciate the wonder of being bound in such a way to this other life. Her mother taught her how to find and harvest miner’s lettuce and other wild greens, and how to use herbs and herbal treatments for healing and wellness. Her mother grew her own wheat grass and juiced it (which she did not like), and endless jars full of sprouts (which she did). Her father showed her how to light a fire in the stove; a power outage still smells to her like pea soup and wood smoke. She learned to love the smell of sun-dried laundry, and rain, and sea-brined sand, and good dirt.
When she was older they moved to Ohio, eventually settling in another forest, this one a new-growth nut forest. The girl learned this land even better than the other. She learned the best spots for catching salamanders and crawdads in the creek. She learned to harvest greens and nuts for food and herbs for remedies. She learned how to make potions. She got two sisters and learned about caring for babies. She spent her summers designing wildflower bouquets with them, and all year roaming the woods with her brother and the dogs. She learned how to garden and cook, how to raise goats for milk and chickens for eggs and how to butcher deer. She learned to love the land with a fierce protectiveness, and that trees and horses make the best listeners, and how to avoid and treat frostbite. She learned to sew and weave and crochet and even spin yarn. She learned to love the feel of fibers, and the thrill of giving something beautiful and useful and totally hers as a gift of love to another. She was often lonely, but never bored. She found words to be an antidote for loneliness.
Her mother taught her about ritual, lighting candles and singing prayers every Friday night to welcome in Lady Sabbath. Her mother did these things while draped in a silky black scarf threaded with shimmering gold that looked like magic. She learned the prayers, and how to light the candles, and bake the challah, and how to anticipate and prepare for the yearly festivals. She sat and watched the candles burn with her family, she drank the grape juice and ate the buttery bread, she listened to the prayers and chants and readings—some unique to the festival and occasion, and some always the same. It all felt like magic, and magic felt more like home than anything else.
And they wonder why I grew up to be a witch.