A coven is not a church; there are no buildings, no pastors with divinity degrees, no Women’s Group postings on the bulletin board; only my parents’ living room on a Friday night, the coffee table filled with athames (wiccan ceremonial knives) and chalices and candles. Ultimately, there is nothing material to hold the enterprise together—nothing but the will of its members. That’s all fine: when it works, it’s full of intimacy and love, a good place to grow up in.
But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes people disappear—they move away, or they get divorced, or a friendship ends violently—and they take their memories with them. A few things get saved—some records of the early days, some lists of names unspoken for decades—but it seems like so much more has been lost, stolen away by changes of address and wounds that never had a reason to heal.
I’ve learned things I never even knew to ask about by leafing through this folder—a history that I didn’t know existed. Mostly it makes me wonder how much more there is to find, how many more people I owe some of myself to. I want to know my people, my parents, what their lives were like before I was born. Working-class Missourians like my parents were probably not the people Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders would have expected to reach. But somehow their religion did, passing from England, with love from Deryk and Carrie, through Watersmeet, through Sabbatsmeet, through Pleiades, through my parents, to me. It just seems so improbable—but it happened. How?
I heard that Tom, the one who sent the Samhain invitation with the grinning bat, went into the hospital last week. Liver failure. It doesn’t seem right that a man who would remind his friends to bring their “teddy bears & other favorite cuddlies” should be vulnerable to that. But people are fragile, and too easy to lose. Sometimes the invitations outlast the parties.
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