Okay, for the record, jokes about witches have to be clever, and even then, you only get one.
Like if I was a Jew, and you made a good joke about Jews, I could laugh off one, if it said something true.
Why am I going on about this? Because I met this guy. His name is Flint, which my friend Jamie thinks is awful, but I think is great. He was funny, and we got to speculating about how exactly crows communicate with each other and he mentioned the pineal gland, which is the seat of the imagination, and also mentioned that my white leather knee-length vintage coat deserved a hat and a cane. And his pecs looked so good in his worn t-shirt… Really, that last was an afterthought. I swear.
But I gave him my number.
That was before I found out that he voted for Rand Paul.
Today he texted me: What do good witches do for the full moon?
And, I had just finished making a rhubarb almond polenta cake for tonight’s full moon ritual! I used rhubarb from my garden that I planted more than ten years ago as a gift to my ex-husband. I have never, ever cooked with it. Until today.
So many things are mending!
Maybe new love is on the way! I made the cake in a heart-shaped cake pan that I got at the Senior Center Stop-and-Shop for $1.20. Look:
So I texted Flint a picture of it. And he wrote: Is that what “your people” fed Hansel and Gretel?
Which is sort of clever… So I gave him a gentle off-ramp: Grimms got us all wrong, I wrote.
But then he kept at it. Finally, he asked about whether there would be human sacrifice.
Okay, I don’t want to seem humorless, but isn’t it particularly ironic to be asking the faith that was burned at the stake by the millions about human sacrifice?
All done.
But that was such a small part of my night! At the ritual, we sang and danced to the moon and closed with a gratitude ceremony. We sat on the wooden floor of my friend’s living room and poured our gratitude out. I said thanks for all the gifts and changes of the last year, the ones that looked like gifts and the ones that maybe didn’t at the time, poured my gratitude for all of them into a beautiful crystal vase of water. We did this one by one and then we let the water bless us in turn.
We were almost done when I had this feeling that there was a need left… “Someone who needs a blessing?” I asked. And two of the circle immediately named a fellow witch. I hadn’t heard: She is both pregnant and sick with lung cancer. And we grounded and reached and sent our love down to her, a sweet tone of healing and ease and hope.
There’s so much to be grateful for: my home and my family, my circle of magical friends, the death of my exoskeleton, the return of the rhubarb, and the ability to say “All done.”