10:57 a.m. - 2023-11-24
bottle tree

She wasn't a real witch. Not to my knowledge anyway. And I realize that even insinuating as much plays into problematic stereotypes: the reclusive elderly spinster with an unruly shock of white hair...living alone in a decrepit cabin in the woods. But considering that her cabin was across the creek from my place, and that I had a little nephew who needed a proper scaring on holiday visits, I'd conveniently cast her in the role. Because that's an uncle's job in my family--terrifying the next generation.

I still recall my own roster of bespoke bogeymen: the grumpy goat under the porch, waiting to bite noisy children, the ghost in the attic w/a hook for a hand (a hook that, in retrospect, looked a lot like a coat hanger). and the pirate-skeleton who'd somehow made his way 300 miles inland to be buried outside my bedroom window, where he could groan campy death threats around bedtime. I've come to realize that there's value in this sort of psychological hazing. Because fear of the supernatural stokes a young imagination, and because that weird anxiety is a great primer for our less-fantastic but exponentially more dangerous lives-to-come...for a world of shit worries and headlines fit to horrify the spookiest of hook-handed specters.

~ ~ ~

Thus the two of us came to be ranch-mates on this remote parcel of the Hill Country. Not that we ever saw each other; I'd been here for months before I finally spotted her out by the road checking her mail, and the only other indication of her presence was in the winter, when the leaves had shed and a faint light from her cabin would show through the barren tangle of trees and briars that surround it...

Six years passed then, before the first and only time we spoke--when I heard a knock on my door late one afternoon. This was a rare enough occurrence in itself, made stranger-still by the fact that I hadn't heard a vehicle approach down my lengthy drive. Perhaps it was because I'd expected to see one of the ranch-hands asking to borrow a tool, or perhaps some part of me had come to believe my own stories about Wanda, but the sight of a very old woman alone on foot at my door totally startled me. Anyway, it seems a baby deer had tangled itself in her fence, and its bleating and thrashing had clearly distressed her. “Not to worry”, I said, and tossed a knife and pistol in a backpack before I drove her home, located the unfortunate beast, and put it out of its misery.*

I saw her once more after that. A tree had fallen across a fence in the north pasture and, as I was laboring to replace the crushed section, I noticed her out picking wildflowers. Nothing special, weeds really, but she held them in a little bouquet as she sang to herself, oblivious to my presence. She passed away shortly thereafter. Two years ago now.

Someone contacted her next-of-kin, a distant nephew I believe, and asked him to come by and take anything of sentimental value from the house before we tore it down. I'm presuming he did? I don't know, and we never got around to demolishing the place. Also, until this week, I never got around to checking it out. This is quite out of character...I've been drawn to empty/abandoned buildings since I was a child. Maybe it was the habit of respecting each other's privacy that kept from crossing the creek to explore? Or maybe I was worried about what I might find...that the evidence of her lonely life would remind me too much of my own. Of the fact that I too had found “a quiet spot to live out my last days”.

As to whatever Wanda's nephew may or may not have collected, I cannot speak. But the house is still full of furnishings, the cabinets full of spices and teacups. Skeins of yarn are piled by the battered sofa, and a wheelchair sits parked by the back door. Alas, there was no evidence of witchcraft to be found. To the contrary, in her yard I discovered this bottle-tree, a traditional Southern safeguard against evil spirits...

~ ~ ~

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