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 labelled 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 first book just so, and gasped.
Because when the back cover faced up in the strong light of a summer’s afternoon, this innocuous collection of outdated essays revealed another persona. Underneath the commercially produced cover was a different cover, one with swirls of silver leaf and other embellishments. I could see all that under the veil of the paper cover, and I couldn’t tell if it was something I could reveal simply by peeling that layer back—which I could do—or if I would need to use a magical touch or incantation—which I would need help with.
I opted to try my athame. The blade, which I was supposed to use for witchy rituals, had a very dull edge and spent most of its time on my bureau.
Athame in hand, I paused at the threshold to my office. Sun streamed through my open window, giving the full weight of its attention to the section of the floor covered with books. The pesky dust motes that followed me down from the attic converted to sparkly bits of pink, orange, and yellow glitter in the light.
I giggled a bit at the presentation, squatted near the first victim, and sliced a thin line all around the edge of the rectangular cover. As I cut, the paper curled off the under-layer, and when the tip of my knife sliced the last bit of paper, the raggedy cover turned to translucent ash. Marveling at the true cover, I set my thumb pad to one corner and lifted.
Centered on a book plate affixed in the middle of the frontispiece, written in cursive by a steady hand, was Genevieve V. du Sang Volume III.
Mama. Memories of swimming in the ocean with my mother washed over me, turning my body liquid and forcing my eyes to water. A memory from my nap in the burial mound added itself to the eddy of emotions, and before I knew it I was awash in my mother’s presence.
I hadn’t asked for Christoph’s—and by extension, my father’s—last name. But now I had my mother’s.
I pressed an open hand to my heart. Acquiring yet another detail about my parentage was no small thing. I delved further, resting my fingertips on the cover’s ruby-colored leather, hoping to sense a shift or reaction.
Swirling lines of silver gilt depicted trees, leaves, flowers, birds, animals, and arcane symbols. I pivoted on my knee and dragged the flower press and sketchbook from under my desk. Opening to a page
