I call them the “Good Witches,” they meet at least once a week and they usually occupy a corner of the Round House Cafe. In the right light, you can see light and sparks coming off their table, there are always shrieks of laughter, exclamations, whispers and often, some tears.
I have no doubt that each one of them would have been burned at the stake or placed in a stock at various points in human history. They eat scones and flowers, muffins and beets, sometimes they dance together in the moonlight or their homes or in offices and studios. They send text messages filled with strange moving figures and sounds, and make the leaves rustle on trees.
One of them is my wife.
I have always loved witches, especially when I learned that almost all of them are good ones. They are the world’s best healers.
When I was active in Quaker Meeting, we would give refuge and support to witches being persecuted by jealous and proprietary doctors – the witches were always selling herbs and potions, good witches know how to mend people. I loved them and they loved me, perhaps more than ordinary people did.
One of them said I had the potential to be a sorcerer, she swore I was an empath and a prophet.
In The Night Garden, Cartherynne Valente wrote “never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a a Witch.”
It is good advice. One of the witches is Maria, one is Mandy, a massage therapist and healer, the other is Athena, a singer and spiritualist and mystic. The Good Witches communicate easily, they speak in tongues and once in awhile, I think I’ve seen their eyes rolling in the back of their heads. They love messaging systems, but most of all, they like to gather and stir pots. They talk to animals, change the temperature in rooms, read minds, turned spilt water into mist.
They can change the color of their hair in a flash, and fill coffee cups without rising.
They burn herbs and incense and are good friends to one another. When one is upset, the others come running, or just appear, sending messages through the air. They are loyal to one another, and protective.
They are spiritually connected, they each draw on the emotions of the other. Even I can feel the energy of their gatherings, I try and be nice to them, I bring them cookies and sweets as offerings, I don’t wish to be turned into a frog again. Good Witches need other Good Witches, most people do not understand them.
When I met Maria, she and I were virtually friendless, the few friends either of us had vanished and hid when we got divorced, they did not know what to make of us or how to be around us. Perhaps they could see she was a witch, I just loved her, she seemed quite normal to me. At the time, she was nearly mute, she had lost her voice. She has found it now.
I am still largely friendless – I do have one or two new friends, to be honest – but Maria has opened up in ways that are mysterious and wonderful. If you look at her wonderful work, it is filled with magic and spirituality, there is no doubt she is a witch or maybe a pagan, it would not surprise me to see her dancing naked out in the woods in the Spring with flowers in her hair, and birds circling overhead, with the donkeys and the sheep and the chickens, she talks to them all of the time.
I love to run across the Good Witches, and see them in their Round House coven – the same table always seems to be available, whenever they show up for lunch together and share their secrets, hopes and dreams. It would be wise not to cross them, there are all sorts of blue-eyed barn cats running around up here.