Et tu, GOP?

 

the sign reads “et tu, GOP? Teachers have been betrayed!” as part of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.

Photo courtesy of NC Policy Watch.

Dreamer's Ball

Pagan Blog Project - Week Twelve- F #2 – Fairies

This is a continuation of my post Sweet Lady for week eleven of the Pagan Blog Project.

Even though the lineage of my family isn’t the most formal (like, no one is passing down heirlooms or great heroic stories or anything like that) my mom was great about fostering new traditions with me and my sisters. She kind of hates holidays, but she always went all out for us kids. That always meant a lot, especially now that I’m an adult and I feel similar now to how she has always felt about holidays. I can look back and see how hard it must have been for her. But, I’d like to think that St. Patrick’s Day is one holiday that she actually enjoyed.

From very early on she encouraged a sense of magic for this holiday. I remember being in kindergarten and she made a point to make me wear green to bed or the leprechauns would get me. I tried to argue with her, of course, insisting that I was going to wake up that night and get them and their gold. She laughed, tucked me in, and let’s just say that night I had a dream that, to this day, I still remember quite vividly. In all honesty, it shaped my world view concerning magic, St. Patrick’s Day, leprechauns, and fairies.

So, a tradition was born and I went to bed every March 17 wearing as much green as I could. And when my sisters came along, sharing this blooming family mythos with them was quite easy. When they were old enough I started telling them leprechaun and fairy stories, too.

One of my favorite things to do with my kid sisters was to take them on leprechaun hunts. They’d be different every time, continuously evolving and changing, each year more exciting and detailed than the last. I’d take them through creek beds, following scavenger hunts, cryptic letters, chalk drawings, maps made from notebook paper stained with coffee and teabags, making traps out of glitter and shoe boxes, following clues and trails left by my friends. It didn’t matter, because it was something magical we could share together.

And after taking them on a chase around town or in the desert, the trail would always lead to home, because maybe even then I was trying to teach them that true magic was in the most mundane of places, even if that place was in low income housing or a trailer park or in the poor part of town.

Darling Niece and Spoiled Sister, 2013

 

One of the best moments of my life was when I was away at college and my mom called me up to tell me that my sisters were taking my step-siblings on a leprechaun hunt. My heart could never be any bigger than it was at that moment, knowing that our fairy tradition was being passed down to a new generation. And now that my sisters have started reproducing, I hope that my nieces and nephews get to go on leprechaun hunts, too, that the fairy magic of my family is passed down to them.

And of course, my sisters and I now have a healthy respect and fear of fairies. Like the year that they heard the banshee wailing at the high school bleachers, or the time that the banshee caught my friend Patty behind the house, or the time that my little sister swore to me that she saw a leprechaun in her bedroom and to this day I can’t tell if she’s trying to pull my leg or she’s telling the truth. (both are equally likely)

So this is my experience with fairy magic. It’s family traditions and fun. It’s a healthy experience of blurring fantasy with reality. It’s about finding something to laugh and shriek about, of reclaiming a time and tradition for you and your loved ones. It’s making magic in the mundane, which is as real and genuine as this stuff can get, anyway.

Éirinn go Brách!

Sweet Lady

Pagan Blog Project - Week Eleven - F #1 – Food

My mom has always been big into her Irish heritage. (Though she’s moved into a Scottish thing in the past few years after she found out our Irish family really comes from Scotland…) Every St. Patrick’s Day she’d go all out with making soda bread (both sweet and savory), corned beef, potato soup (green!), and as an extra special treat – Irish potato candy! My friends would always love coming over to my house for St. Patrick’s Day because the food was always so good. I’ve tried to carry on this tradition in my adulthood. I have friends who celebrated with me and my family back in the day, and now they make potato soup and Irish potato candy every March, too. And that’s the magic of food and making traditions!

 

Irish Potato Candy – no potatoes!

Ingredients:

One package cream cheese, softened

One stick of butter, softened

One tablespoon of vanilla extract

One large package of powdered sugar (about 32 ounces)

One small package of dried coconut flakes (about 5 ounces)

Lots of cinnamon (or chocolate powder or melted chocolate)

Suggested - gloves

• Mix crease cheese, vanilla, and butter in a bowl. Softened is easier. Some suggest whipped cream cheese, but I’ve never used this.  
• Mix in the dry ingredients. A little at a time works best. This will be messy. Just keep on mixing and mixing and mixing. It will all blend together. It will be very sticky. If you use gloves, it will be easier (but still kind of messy.)
• You can easily change how much of each ingredient you use. Some like less sugar and more coconut. For me, it depends on the day.
• Whatever mixture you use, make sure everything is blended together very well. Put this mixture in the fridge or freezer for some time. Longer is better, but this step is not super necessary, it just helps a bit because it hardens stuff up and makes it a bit less sticky.
• Once you think you are ready, take the sticky mixture and roll it into little balls. Take these balls and roll them into your cinnamon or chocolate powder, or, dip them into melted chocolate. You want the little candies to look like little miniature potatoes – white on the inside, brown on the outside.
• Enjoy! People love these little guys, and they tend to go very fast. Easy to make (although messy) and very tasty, they’re a family favorite and they make good gifts, too.

Dead on Time/Walk the Line

Everyone used to call my Grandma Johnson “Snooks.” I don’t know where the nickname came from, but I only wish I could be so cool as to have a nickname like that. Her mother named her Norma Jean, and she was a skinny, black-haired lady who was full of piss and vinegar. I was told once that she was in an accident when she was younger, that all of her blonde hair fell out, and it all grew back black. I don’t know if this is true or not. Maybe I made it up.

She was born to a feisty Scottish woman, and she had three older sisters. Her father was an Irish ballplayer and bootlegger. She used to sell buckets of water to the gypsies who lived in the park across the street. She herself had a little bit of gypsy blood in her as well,  what I like to imagine was the blood of the Irish Travelers, but I’m not positive.

Grandma Johnson met Grandpa Johnson while on horseback. He was out riding with his best friend, a Norwegian named Johnson. Grandma was out with her best friend. The four met, paired off, fell in love, and were close for most of their lives.

Grandpa Johnson was drafted into the Army and the family moved to Hawaii. There they had my Uncle Jim, who was the apple of my Grandma’s eye. She came from a family and a generation that favored boys over girls, which seems paradoxical to me when I look at the dynamic women in her family.

The family moved back to Montana, and my mother was born. Grandma Johnson wasn’t a great mother, and Grandpa Johnson wasn’t a great father. This chapter of my family’s history is riddled with abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. But, for all of the stories of the bad things that happened, I’ve heard just as many, if not more, stories of the good things, too. It’s like that Hank Williams Jr. song, “if I get stoned and sing all night long, it's a family tradition."

Snooks struggled with alcoholism her whole life. She smoked. She had eating disorders. She wrote bad checks. She was abused by her husband. She fought (physically) with her sisters and other family members. Her son and nephews were drug addicts and brought criminals to her home on a regular basis. When she’d call us up on holidays, she was often drunk on tequila. She told us once that she loved to howl at the moon.

Grandma Johnson loved cats, even when they were mean to her. She loved her grandchildren. She loved horses and she loved Native American artifacts, jewelry, artwork, and memorabilia. I have some of her beaded earrings. I don’t know if a Native friend of hers made them, or if she crafted them herself. She liked the color pink. She loved turquoise. While I won’t wear her giant pink earrings, I love wearing her turquoise rings; big, huge, gaudy, beautiful. They’re full of luck.

She was wonderful artist who painted epic, beautiful landscapes. I used to go into her studio and look at all of the oils, paints and colors. Look and never touch. Grandpa Johnson kept her artwork around his house throughout all of my childhood, even though they divorced when I was about ten. Grandpa was abusive (and I imagine Grandma was, too) but he loved my Grandma her whole life, and he was devastated when she passed.

Grandma Johnson moved down to New Mexico and was there for a few years. This gave her enough time to reconnect with my mother, and to form a relationship with my sisters. She came to Texas for Christmas one year to celebrate with me and my then-fiancé/now-husband (who she never did like). It was a great holiday, but she was diagnosed with cancer immediately after. I’ll always wonder if the trip was what made her so sick, after a six hour drive from Alamogordo to Lubbock and back again.

The cancer was pretty terrible, but she fought it the best she could. My family took care of her, and I’m so glad that they were able to spend this time together. I have guilt feelings about not being there to help out, but I’m proud of my family for being so loving and strong through those hard times.

When I was a baby and toddler, she took care of me. We were very close. She would feed me ice cream and let me play with kittens. I loved her very much. She gave me her mother’s jewelry, my Great-Grandma Lonie. The last time I saw her, her psychosis from the cancer was setting in. She was barely coherent. She was not the strong, fiery woman I knew. I’ll always regret those last moments. The women who took care of me in my infancy, I was unable to help her in her old age.

She wasn’t happy in New Mexico, and though it was a painful decision for her and for my mother and sisters, Grandma moved back to Oregon to die. She was back with her sisters, the alcoholism and drugs, but this is where she wanted to be. My mom was able to fly up there and say goodbye. When she died, her family pawned all of her belongings. I was able to get some of her jewelry, and I put this out in a bowl on my altar every year with her mother’s faux pearls, and with Grandma Val’s penguins.

 

When she died, I was relieved. She had been in pain and fighting for so long. I was so glad she was finally at rest. Her cancer was terrible, and it was killing my mom and sisters to be so far away from her, so helpless. Like the true cowgirl she was, Grandma Johnson never stopped fighting, though. I’m sure she’s up there Indian Wrestling angels in heaven and drinking Jesus under the table. And I’m sure that Johnny Cash, one of her favorite musicians, is singing just for her. Because she lived her life like his words – Snooks walked the line.