The brave, big-headed boy lay on the grass, stunned. I cupped his body in my palms before tucking him under a clump of scarlet bee balm.
The kingfisher must have hit one of the upper windows. I scanned the A-frame’s façade and smacked my forehead.
Because, of course. A doll-sized trunk containing my mother’s things was stored in the attic, as was a shelf full of moldering books that were dated and dusty when I first played under the low eaves at age six.
Chapter 12
I grabbed a cleaning cloth out of the supply cupboard and ran to the second-floor landing. Snagging the length of rope that dangled from the door panel laying flush with the ceiling, I gave a tug. The tiny bell on the end of the string tinkled, and as the stairs unfolded with rusty groans and squeaks, a light bulb clicked on overhead.
No one had been in the attic since my last visit, if the undisturbed drag marks told the truth. I bent at the waist to avoid hitting my head on the crossbeams and activated my phone’s flashlight when I got close enough to read the book titles.
A handful looked old enough to have been printed and bound two or three generations ago, and most looked to be volumes dedicated to creating the model housekeeper.
I hooked my finger over a spine marked Winter Celebrations and rested the book on my lap. A swipe of the flannel rag revealed an embossed illustration of holly leaves and berries centered on the book’s cover, with faint touches of gold visible in the title’s lettering. Inside were chapters devoted to every aspect of winter rituals from the solstice onward, all of them based on the witch’s calendar.
I’m not sure why I was surprised. I knew so little about either side of my family. Maybe it shouldn’t have felt newsworthy to discover I had been born into a line of magic practitioners. Inside the book’s front cover was a name and a date, but the ink was too faded to decipher and my sensitivity to dust was beginning to irritate the insides of my nostrils.
I swept the flashlight across the rest of the books. The ones that caught my eye were two more with Good Housesweeping in the title and three more volumes dedicated to the seasons. I made a stack and grunted my way to the opening in the floor. The books were heavy. Keeping my butt on the slatted ladder steps, I got them all down and to my office in one trip.
My legs went wobbly enough I had to plunk clumsily onto the only chair, and as I perused my haul, the skin on my arms tingled. I leaned forward, ducked my head under my desk, and pulled out the three volumes of Good Housesweeping I’d scarfed from the attic on a prior search.
Arrayed on the floor in front of me, front covers facing up, were five volumes of witchy wisdom from the fifties, sixties, and seventies and the four much older tomes of Magical knowledge.
I pushed the chair aside, sat cross-legged on the floor, and went through the bound books one at a time. Each had the same faint inscription on the inside page and chapter after chapter of rituals, recipes, songs, and spells. Taking the Winter volume into my lap, I scanned the chapter headings and found recipes for seed bread and suggestions for which seeds were most appropriate to use for Imbolc’s Seeds of Dreams planting ritual, to take place on February first.
Closing the cover, I hugged the book to my chest. This was what I had been missing for most of my life. Ritual. I felt the longing when I was in the forest with the circle of witches at my ritual of initiation, and I felt it now.
The next marker on my life’s new calendar, wheel-shaped and ruled by the cycles of the moon, was the autumn equinox on September twenty-first. I vowed to honor the change of seasons, whether I was a member of a coven by then or not.
A quick perusal of the three other volumes convinced me their contents were as advertised on their spines and none was doing double-duty as my mother’s grimoire. I stacked the four on the shelf under my desk and turned to appraise my collection of Good Housesweeping.
I rocked forward onto my hands and knees, lifted the front covers, and thumbed the lower corners. The pages fanned apart without any loose bits of paper dislodging themselves and delivering me secret messages.
On closer inspection, it was clear there was nothing more within the heavy covers than recipes and tips on being a more effective and complete marital partner and homemaker.
How positively nineteenth century.
Sitting back on my heels, I tried another approach. Lifting the left-most volume, I ran my thumb down and up its spine. The heavier, treated paper crinkled with age but didn’t crack or split. I brought the book to my nose and sniffed. Any hope of scenting my mother or the house in Maine was long gone. These just smelled like pages and pages of old paper that had spent most of their years expanding with damp in the winter and drying to a crisp in the summer.
Each bound section was divided by heavy paper stock. Tabs labeled the content of each. And at the back of each section were three pages with “Notes” printed at the top. I flipped through all five volumes.
One was blank, and within all the others, someone—my mother, perhaps, or my aunt or maybe their mother—had added handwritten recipes. At least, they looked like recipes. The writing was tiny, though the lines were straight, and the lists of ingredients, accompanied by abbreviations like c and tsp, were indented.
I slid the earpieces of my reading glasses behind my ears, positioned the
