My mother is a witch.  Now, if anyone tells her I said this, she will be terribly offended, having an unnaturally negative opinion of witches.  In fact, when at age 7, I informed my maternal grandfather that my mother had spilled a big family secret, that HIS mother was a Real Witch, he slapped his knee and guffawed, and no one seemed to think it was a compliment.

So please, don’t anyone share with her that I said that.

Shh.

Witches work all kinds of magic.  When I was knee high to a grasshopper, my father started his own business.  I didn’t know it at the time, but we were desperately poor—he had sold his small farm, bought a little house, and put the little he had left into the business.  Not only that, he had to wait a while before he started bringing home any kind of useful income.  These are the experiences that the first couple of children born to a union are exposed to.  A close family friend dropped off a 50 pound sack of pinto beans. “That’ll keep you,” he said.

And it did.  We ate pinto beans with ham for dinner for weeks.  Pinto beans with bacon drippings and cornbread.  Leftover pinto beans fried up inside a tortilla for lunch.  “Beans are the best food,” my father would say.  “The only way you can make them better is to eat them again.”

To this day, I love pinto beans.  In fact, when I discovered that a nearby restaurant cooked up ham and pinto beans just like my mother did…everyone else was ordering fancy plates, and there I sat with my bowl of pinto beans, savoring the taste of love.

My mother’s magic didn’t stop at the kitchen door.  While other little kids were carted off to the doctor monthly for chronic ear infections, my mother would sit up all night with me when I was hurting, filling and refilling a hot water bottle for me to lay my ear on, warming up sweet oil and dropping it in my ear for pain relief. Only a mother with some kind of intuitive healing powers would have realized that pumping little bodies full of antibiotics did more harm than good, killing off their microscopic gut gardens.

And it didn’t stop there, either.  She mixed the strangest mediums and tossed them out in her garden…old coffee grounds, eggshells, potato peels—everything went into the garden.  Nasty stuff that other people put in their round, metal trash cans…these were the days before dumpsters.  And then, every spring, my father would till up the garden while she followed behind with a hoe, dragging out rows for all of the vegetables that we would eat in the coming year.  She didn’t believe in buying vegetables, you see, and after I left home and bought my first groceries, I realized why.  Those manufactured tomatoes were a sin against God and man.

Now, my mother’s garden is where you realize fully her witchery.  Because where she dumped old, stale coffee grounds, bits of leftover pancakes and syrup, smudges of chokecherry jam and eggshells, beautiful plants sprang up.  And not just any plants—rhubarb as high as a man’s shoulder.  Grape vines towering over your head.  The tomatoes, and the carrots, and the chard and the radishes, and the sweetcorn and the strawberries and the okra and the green beans-and-garden peas-and- dill-and-potatoes-and-peppers-and-zucchini-and-yellow crookneck-and-buttercup-and-cabbages-and-raspberries-and-cucumbers…and that wasn’t all.  “Plant marigolds with your carrots,” she would say.  And there, nodding next to the rows of beans were groups of zinnias, and now a sweet pea vine dotted with purple blooms.  And scattered cosmos, and just past the squash a nasturtium, and then some bright blue, smiling bachelor buttons…It was nothing short of magical.

Every morning, she would disappear for hours in the garden.  And come harvest time, she and my father would haul in baskets upon baskets of fresh produce to be put up for the winter.

All of this would be more believable had they lived someplace like Oregon, or Iowa…but this happened in WYOMING!

They raised three daughters and three sons on the harvest from that garden.  Healthy, contributors to society, all with children of their own, and even the appearance of a 4th generation!  Why, when we got together for their 50th anniversary a couple of years ago, we had to spread out in front of a whole row of hay bales and even stack a few people on top of them just to get us all in the photo.  Yes, you see, over the years, they earned enough money to move back out to the farm.

If that isn’t witchery, I don’t know what is.

Happy Mother’s Day!