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Nippy today.
Well, middle of February. Gotta expect it.
Could be worse.
Well, we don't have hurricanes, volcanoes, or earthquakes.
Seen warmer.
Seen colder.
Warmer next week, I hear.
All uphill from here.
Well, at least we're not in Duluth.
If you're in Duluth:
The Minnesota Foot-Tap
How to Get into a Car: Summer
(Beltane to Samhain)
How to Get into a Car: Winter
(Samhain to Beltane)
Territories of Time
Witches, like other predators, are territorial animals.
Territories of place, though, are not the only kind of territory.
“So, how was your Fourth?”
I'm talking with Aura who, at 84, has as good a claim to being Grandmother to the local community as anyone. (Of Carl "Llewellyn" Weschke's very first crop of initiates, she alone remains: still fully engaged, still sharp as an athame's edge.)
My question was casually intended, mere open-ended conversation-fodder.
Little did I realize down what paths it would lead.
Unlike pagan immigrants like me—there are many here—Aura's an autochthon, born right here in Minneapolis, the Water City. (That's what the name means literally: a Dakota-Greek hybrid, aptly enough.) What had she done with her Independence Day? She had spent it driving around with one of her daughters-in-the-Craft, tracking down all the places where she's lived in this pagan city during her long and rich life.
Witches do this kind of thing. The Wise remember, and place is the medium of our memory. My own coven, too, has done the driving tour of all our various covensteads through our now-going-on-50-year-history.
Territories of place are not the only kind of territory.
It took them a while to track down the first house where Aura lived after she was born: she hadn't seen it in years. Finally, they managed to locate it. Her eyes sparkle as she tells me.
“Was I ever surprised when I looked across the street and saw your car in the driveway,” she says.
Turns out it's right across the street from my house.
In the early days of Paganistan, M and N were everyone's favorite couple. Even when the Witch Wars burned through and people weren't talking to people, everybody still loved them.
They were witches, Alexandrians, both fine-looking folks. Somehow, even that never created any hard feelings, they were just so much in love with one another. It was hard to think of them separately, so naturally did they fit together. A friend, in conversation, once referred to them as lovers, then corrected herself.
“You guys are so much in love, I keep forgetting that you're married,” she laughed, and we all joined in, because it was so true.
When M died, it came as a shock to us all. For one thing, she wasn't very old. For another, well...she was just so vital. She'd known that she was sick, of course, but hadn't wanted to darken her last days by spreading the knowledge around. N, of course, was with her to the end. It seemed utterly fitting that she should have died on Valentine's Day.
She hadn't been out to her folks; in those days, few of us were. The pagan community showed up en masse—no pun intended—for her funeral. There probably hadn't been that many witches in a church since the Burning Times. In the eulogy, the priest kept talking about what a good Christian she'd been.
February is a windy, cold month in Minnesota. A stiff, bitter breeze blew in off the prairie as we stood in the cemetery. Still—M would have loved it—there was something playful, even carnivalesque, about that graveside service. Someone, incredibly, had brought along a bouquet of helium balloons: bright colors against the stark, white snowscape. After the prayers, they released them. Watching those balloons soar up and away into they sky was heartbreaking, the perfect metaphor. As they flew away, the tears flowed.
Afterward, the pagans gathered over food and drink for our own remembrance. N looked devastated.
Sorrow had made me bitter. The priest's words still rankled; I complained about them to a friend.
But he was wiser than I.
In this Land of Ten Thousand Storytellers, Kevin Kling has got to be one of the very best.
Here's a story from his boyhood.
When you're seven years old and growing up in a Norwegian Lutheran town on Minnesota's Iron Range, you know that there are certain things that you just can't do. One of them is to bother Pastor Lindquist—who is, after all, right up there next to the Big Guy—with theological questions.
But one night at the church supper Kevin finds himself sitting next to the pastor's wife, and he figures that she might be close enough to the Source to ask.
“Mrs. Lindquist,” says Kevin, “If Jesus and Buddha got into a fight, who would win?”
“Well, Jesus would win, of course,” says Mrs. Lindquist.
“Well, if Jesus and Allah got into a fight, who would win?” asks Kevin.
“Jesus would win,” says Mrs. Lindquist.
“Well, if Jesus and Odin got into a fight, who would win?” Kevin asks.
There's a long pause.
What do they do in winter, the women of the waters? In our Land of Ten Thousand Iced-In Lakes, do they sleep burrowed deep like turtles or frogs? Do they dream in suspended animation, frozen in ice, like fish? Or do they slowly swim beneath the ice, haunting with their singing the fisherman in his lonely ice-house?
It seems as if everyone knows them: mermaids, nixies, necks, nereids, víly, rusalki, we call them. Every spring, every pond, every lake, has its own, they say, and some lakes many. Old in the land, the Anishinabe—known to the Cree, who spoke a related but unintelligible language, as Chippewa, “mutterers”—call them nebaunaubaequaewuk. Everyone agrees that their beauty is a dangerous beauty.
They take people, and children in particular; in our own day, people are taken. In summer they sing and dance, especially on nights when the full moon floats like a shining lily on every lake. Our attraction is a mutual attraction, and many stories tell of the handsome youth or maid who goes to live with them and is never seen again. Sometimes they marry humans, but such matings rarely end well. Although we reflect one another, in the end, the People of the Land and the People of the Waters are different peoples, other.
