Witch Sisters III

I'm heading down Chicago's Longwood Drive, looking past the wet leaves sticking to my windshield and watching the last bits of bright gold desperately cling to the windblown Maple branches.  The sky is low and heavy and grey.  My mind sees it purple.  The atmosphere is a book, a fantasy, a painting.

The only thing missing are the witches. As I pass the Irish Castle, I look up over the hill and through the branches and I pretend they're there, just over the turrets; circling the old limestone battlements on top of the hill.

I know they've been in the Broom Room all summer, spinning and flying and cackling. And waiting for this time of year. A Beetlejucian production worthy of Tim Burton showing up and directing it himself. But we don't need him, because we have my father.

In some ways, the three sisters aren't archetypal witches.  Yeah, they have pointy hats and broomsticks.  Cauldrons and warts, yes. But they're not scraggly and smelly shopping-cart ladies like you might see on Western avenue or the L-platform.

Our witches are an eclectic mixture of different themes, like the ones written by the Brothers Grimm and found in family favorites like Magical Beasts and Bed-knobs and Broomsticks. Strangely more Nancy Drew than Creature Features.

My father sketched the witches on scrap mat-board left over from framing projects he did himself in his first gallery - the one next to the railroad station and across the street from Monterey Pharmacy, Kreteck's and Kaden's.

It was probably fun for him too.  He was so busy painting local houses and drawing historical landmarks that any child-like diversion was almost certainly welcome. And thus, they came drifting into our childhoods like bluish wisps of Bond Street smoke from his pipe.

We knew, as the leaves piled up on the driveway and it would get dark just before dinner, that it was witch time.  My father already had a love for storms and clouds and folklore.  All he needed were his pencils and mat-boards and us, and the sisters and their world readily came to life.  Vincent Price had his pipe organ and my father had his art supplies.    

And we were an attentive audience - we'd rather hear about their magical and mischievous antics then listen to an opera or hear about some old building on Prairie Avenue. Give us the girls.

At bedtime, in the days when everyone could fit into the same bed, we'd listen to the witch stories, and my father would draw them as he told them.  I oddly remember his hairy fingers gripping his Turquoise Pencil or his felt-tip pen. The pictures were never really the same, but we didn't care - or probably even notice at the time.

I wish I still had some of the illustrations, just to see them once more. But sometimes memories are even better than the real thing. And when the good ones are happening, you never really know it at the time.

Crumpled pictures find their way into the trash - but memories find their way into blogs.

And when it feels like the fall - a purple-grey sky, a leaf-rustling wind - I think about the Witch Sisters.  I picture my father, in 1966, picking up scraps of mat board from the floor of his gallery to bring home.  And I see him putting that felt-tip marker and Turquoise Pencil in his pocket.

Thanks dad.

Cutting the Blue Spruce

This week, on a blustery fall afternoon, I found a kind of sadness in my parents' front yard.  

I was trimming the aging blue spruce, which stood among a collection of mismatched apple trees. They stood like a maze of confused sentinels, intent on guarding the old Victorian house.

Under the slate sky, I felt the past.  

I saw Riley, our one-time gardener, in his bib overalls and leaning on his rake.  I heard his toothless and raspy Louisiana laugh; possibly at some direction my mother had just issued from the front porch. Maybe asking if he wanted a lemonade.  He'd shake his head, laugh again, and pat his pocket.  

Over there, near the sidewalk, an enormous granite block had been anchored to the lawn.  It was an odd - and certainly incongruous - donation from my father to the orchard.  I could hear him telling the grandchildren that it was actually some kind of old hitching post.  Embellished, of course, by tales of its paranormal powers; that it would mysteriously shift as a result of creepy occurrences around the property.  

I watched the crab-apple shadows as they fell across the antique post, reminding me of the two only-children and their two only-perspectives, living there together in the old house.  I sighed, wondering about a man who would plant an immovable relic in his yard, and the woman who would carelessly crisscross it with a hybrid population of catalog apple trees.  

My father, for his part, was content to paint the relic, as it stood, on Arches 140 lb - in yellow ocher and brown madder. My mother would bake hers, over and over, every season, on long afternoons in her long Victorian kitchen, occasionally stopping to direct Riley on some important yard task. 

Curiously, both post and apples were of madder and ocher.

As I gathered the cut branches on the grass, I saw that the blue-green needles were mostly gone.  After braving so many seasons, they finally succumbed.  In Decembers past, though, these branches were fragrant green and sticky with sap - and the Christmas snow gathered on them like soft powder.  I remember it blowing across the front of our minivan as we pulled into the driveway on certain Christmas Eves.  

After the snow melted in the warm spring winds, we'd sit on the porch and watch the storms.  We were self-appointed lookouts, on the swing with my father, on alert for for lightning strikes and tornado touchdowns. He'd occasionally whisper, "Did you see that?" and we'd all gasp. We'd count until we heard thunder, and watch as the giant oaks threw their branches across the sky in a panic. Then we'd listen for sirens and speculate on devastation we couldn't see. 

On the porch, there on the wall, is a brass plaque.  It commemorates how the old house was restored from broken pipes and windows and leaf-filled rooms. I can see my mother and father standing next to it, posing for a picture; my father in his crew cut, smoking his pipe. My mother in a dress and holding a baby. The Beverly Review taking pictures of them for the local paper.  

Now, no one really looks at the plaque anymore.  It's just an old Victorian house with a big front yard.  With twisted and unkempt apples trees and a weird looking block of granite on the grass. 

And a blue spruce tree that has lost most of its older branches because of things like snow and thunderstorms and old age. 

But looking up, the blues and greens are there - on the younger, higher branches.  Sticky amber sap, like fragrant pine syrup, drips from them to the brittle needles below.  

And past the high branches, if you squint your eyes and see the way I do, you'll probably see my parents in the window, looking out across the yard.  And at their past.

And that's what made me sad on that blustery fall afternoon.