The Good Witch

First published in The Oxford Journal on Wednesday, October 31, 2012.

    When I told an acquaintance that we were building onto our house because my mother was moving in with us, her response was, “Ohmygawd! I could never live my mother. She’s such a WITCH.”

            Most women grow up to be a replica of their mother (for better or for worse) but I have to admit, since that woman’s comment popped into my head last week, when I think of witches, I think of my mother. Especially as Halloween approaches.

            Because this is how a writer’s mind works: I have a column to write that will be published on Halloween. I’m not really into this  particular event, haven’t worn as costume since high school, don’t have kids that make it necessary to do Halloween but it doesn’t make sense to write on any other subject when the column appears on October 31. So I think about the way my mother did Halloween for her two daughters in the seventies: our homemade costumes and the Halloween table cloth and how we went trick-or-treating in town then piled into the car to visit relatives in the country, just like many people around here do. We had to visit Grandma and Grandpa, and Grandma and Grandpa George, and Aunt Reta, and then the Stinsons on the way back home. That drive to the country was as much Halloween to us as the witch that hung on the wall of our dining room.

            But I didn’t remember the old crone until I started thinking that maybe I could get away with writing a non-All Hallow’s Eve column and that woman’s comment popped into my head and that’s the magic – a little witch’s brew, if you will – that happens when a writer has to come up with something to say on a well-worn topic.

            Because that witch hanging on the dining room wall was as fun and silly and good-natured as my mother, as part of the magic my mother created for her two girls on Halloween as the wig of long, matted brown “hair” from the beauty salon next door and Mum’s old fox fur coat.

            Perhaps I can think up a costume for this year: I’ll be a writer. It’s a rather tricky kind of costume, mind, a bit cobbled together like Frankenstein’s Monster. You can bring the bowl of candy up to my office where I’ll be hunched over my computer (Hunchback of Notre Dame), hacking away at my words (Texas Chainsaw Murders), trying to conjure up memorable phrases (Sorcerer’s Apprentice), and hoping that the readers like them (Sally Field winning an Oscar at the 1984 Academy Awards).

            On the other hand, it might be easier to be a witch. Just like my mother.

An Accidental Death

"I still feel badly about the chicken," my friend Jane said to me the other evening as we drove to an author reading in Amherst.
"Oh, don't," I said. "It was just a chicken. No one is to blame."
I was upstairs in my office working when I heard the chickens squawking. And squawking. When I looked out the window, I saw chickens running away from the coop, and Jane and my husband towards the coop.
Then I saw my dog running away from the pen with a chicken in her mouth, her friend Sam hot on her heels.
The game was on.
And what a game it was. The two dogs ended up at the top of the field with two humans chasing them on foot, and one hell bent for leather in his four-wheeler. I was watching the whole thing with the binoculars so I was the only person who saw the dogs standing over what was likely by then a dead chicken, looking as if they were saying, "Now what do we do?"
It's no one's fault.
Our friends had no way of knowing the chickens were loose in the yard because Jane and I haven't been getting together for walks like we used to (now that's MY fault), and Sam always fusses at the chickens when he's here -- he ran circles around the rabbit hutch, too -- so to find the whole coop wide open and chickens all over the place ... !
Even Abby, grabbing a chicken by the neck, only did so egged on by her friend. She's taller and faster than he is, and couldn't resist the chase or the capture. They were two dogs caught up in a moment. I don't expect they "got a taste for blood".
The dogs knew we were displeased, and we'll keep an eye on Abby as long as the chickens are free-ranging till winter begins. But there's need to feel badly about the chicken. It was a bizarre and unexpected event, a completely accidental death.
I wouldn't have said this a few years ago but it was just a chicken.

Crop Inspector

While the cat nip crop dries on my drafting table,
I'm going to have to keep the cats out of my office.

Although I guess Leonard really isn't hurting anything
by sitting in the middle of the table.

The Catnip Harvest

Around here, people grow drugs for themselves.

I grow it for my cats.

My catnip harvest is spread out in my warm, sunny office
where it will dry in order to be stuffed into cat toys.

Afternoon Sun

Just as I sat down in my chair to edit a short story, the sun came out from behind the clouds and lit up the yellow leaves outside my office window, behind the dragonfly ornament. It's hard to concentrate when the sun is calling you and the dragonfly is reminding you and your words are on the page in front of you.
The sun wants me to get outside and walk, stimulate my brain for thinking, blow the old thoughts out and make room for the new ideas emerging from the dark depths of my subconscious.
The dragonfly says, "Don't be afraid to try something different. Believe that your wings are stronger than you realize."
The words say, "More, more, more."
So I worked on the story and sent the pages to my dragonfly queen who will edit and holler back in an email with suggestions that will seem outrageous and unknowable and I will take her words and my words, all squirming and wiggling and not wanting to tie their shoelaces or put on toques, for a long walk in the woods and the yellow leaves,
flopping like wings,
will show me how to make those words straighten up and fly right.

The Autumn Molt

I had to buy eggs the other day. Brown eggs, almost identical in size and colour, perfectly clean, perfectly egg-shaped.
Not a speck of poop, tag of sawdust or lingering feather to be seen.
Not even one green egg in the carton.
How boring.
Our hens are old-ish, and they are molting. The coop and the outside pen are full of feathers, and now that our gardens are done for the years, the chickens are ranging all over the yard so every time I come across a flurry of feathers, it takes me a moment to move from panic -- Raccoon! -- to the realization that the ladies are simply flinging feathers behind them as they traipse around the yard.
The worst part of this annual drop in egg production, brought on both by the molting and the shorter days, isn't having to buy eggs; it's my husband's threats to replace our old-ish hens with new, younger models who will lay eggs.
"We're not running a retirement home here, you know," he says.
Uh, actually, we are. You just refuse to accept it. 
I'll have to make some calls and see if I can't round up a few young layers to toss into the coop for the winter. Perhaps if there are eggs in the boxes, my husband will forget that most of the hens are enjoying their golden years without the hassles of popping an egg out their butt every other day.

What Does Poverty Look Like?

As published in the Citizen-Record newspaper on Wednesday, October 21, 2015, by Sara Jewell.

As a lay worship leader providing short-term pulpit supply for several United Churches in the Oxford area, I have to write a message every week on a particular topic.

            With World Food Sunday on October 18, I decided to learn more about the root of food insecurity – 15% of Nova Scotians do not have unlimited access to nutritious and safe foods – and so I asked two people who are familiar with the issue, What does poverty look like in Cumberland County?

            Colleen Dowe, secretary of the Empowering Beyond Barriers Society, replied, “It looks like no choice. It looks like judgement.”

            She explained that choice means some kids in a classroom get to play hockey while others are lucky to have a healthy snack. It also looks like parents going without food so their children can eat, often running out of money before the end of the month and needing to go to the food bank.

“When you look inside a food bank, everyone’s head is down,” said Dowe who has volunteered at a food bank. “We’re trying to remove the stigma because we need people to use these supports, especially for their kids. So what poverty looks like is people who have no choice. And by judgement, I mean ‘poor bashing’, saying things like ‘I pay taxes so you can lie around’.”

According to the website for the Department of Social Services, a person on social assistance receives $255 each month for groceries, toiletries, transportation, and other non-rent expenses. I can’t imagine $255 goes very far, especially when it comes to buying fresh fruit and vegetables, and meat, let alone non-food essentials like toilet paper and feminine hygiene products.

Not everyone relies on social assistance, however, and Dowe said Cumberland County has a huge number of people who are working poor.

“Often, they’re working three or four jobs because they’re working a few hours here, a few hours there,” Dowe said. “We have a lot of retail and fast food jobs, and the minimum wage has gone up, but if people are not in a full-time jobs, their hours are spread out and they don’t have benefits.”

The greatest victims of poverty, though, are those who truly have no choice: children. When I asked the Executive Director of Maggie’s Place Family Resource Centre in Amherst, what poverty looks like, Carolyn D’Entremont said, “Hopelessness.”

And education is the key.

“If they’ve grown up in this, if they haven’t finished their education then it becomes that unrelenting cycle,” she said. “Some folks are so down, they don’t see a way up. That’s where the hopelessness comes from.”

D’Entremont, too, mentioned judgement.

“People are pretty generous in the community but you do hear the judgmental stuff,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what system you set up, there’s always going to be someone who is going to take advantage of it and you just have to go in accepting that. For the handful who are taking advantage of this, I’m helping ninety others. I’m okay with that.”