Each year they parade her about . . . the traditional witch......
Misshapen green face, stringy scraps of hair, and a toothless mouth beneath her disfigured nose. Gnarled, knobby fingers twisted into a claw, protracting from a bent and twisted torso that lurches about on wobbly legs.
Most think this abject image to be the creation of a predjudiced mind, or merely a Halloween caricature. I disagree. I believe this is how witches were really seen. Consider most witches were women, were abducted in the night, and smuggled into dungeons or prisons under secrecy of darkness, to be presented by the light of the day as a confessed witch.
Few, if any saw a frightened, normal looking woman being dragged into a secret room filled with instruments of torture....to be questioned until she confessed to anything that was suggested to her, and to give names or whatever would stop the questions. Crowds saw the aberration denounced to the world as a self-proclaimed witch.
As the witch was paraded through the town, en route to be burned, hanged, drowned, stoned, or disposed of in variuos other forms of Christian love . . . all created to free and save her soul from her depraved body, crowds viewed the results of hours of torture. The face, bruised and broken, by countless blows, bore a hue of sickly green. The once warm and loving smile gone, replaced by a grimace of broken teeth and torn gums that leers beneath a battered, disfigured nose. The disheveled hair conceals bleeding gaps of torn scalp from whence cruel hands had torn away lovely tresses. Broken, twisted hands clutched the wagon for support. Fractured fingers locked like groping claws to steady her broken body. All resemblances of humanity were gone. This was truly a demon, a satan, a witch.
I revere this Halloween crone and hold her sacred above all. I honor her courage and listen to her warnings of the dark side of humanity. Each year I shed tears of respect and remember her involuntary sacrifice in the name of religion.
May this remind us of those who were persecuted as witches, though many were healers and midwives, women who owned land, and those who spoke out against the rulers of the time. Remember the "Halloween Witch", along with all the others who have gone before you.
As an update, since the original post actually occurred the first week of June, is this. My son DID go to summer school. He finished with an 87, which is 3 points away from an A, so I was very happy with that.
My 9 yr old son, Kyle, the one that failed third grade, also went to summer school. Called summer reading camp, it's free, provided by the school, & gives them another test like the standardized test they had to pass in order to be promoted to the next grade. We JUST found out that he scored a 95% on this second test, so obviously something went wrong with the first test he took. Bottom line, he's being promoted to 4th grade!
The construction on the house addition was finished, it looks wonderful, the AC is in, & we're enjoying it a lot.
Our new show kittens are almost 7 weeks old now, & are into everything. We are very happy with how they are turning out, & I will have new pics of them up soon.
My oldest daughter went & got herself a tattoo. Sigh. Not that it's not pretty, but she got matching ones with her boyfriend. The boyfriend may disappear one of these days, but ink lasts forever. At least it's stars & not his name! Ah well, what can we do? She's 19 1/2, will be 20 in January, she's an adult. She moved out last year after coming to live with us again for the summer. We tried to talk her into staying, but she said she missed her family up north too much. Cest la vie. This is the child who graduated National Honor Society but won't go to college. I think that's WHY she went back up north. They let her do whatever she wants, where if she stayed here with us, she WOULD have been going, because we would have enrolled her! Hopefully one of these days she'll wake up.
All we can do is guide, & give advice. We can hope they'll take it, & learn from OUR mistakes, so they don't make the same stupid ones we did before them.
Hope someone looks at the photos I posted, & enjoys them! Those are just the first ones I tossed up there, so I'd love some feedback!
Life has been really crazy here, so bear with me. The first major mile stone in my life has happened, I'm officially 40. So why don't I feel old? Because age is simply the number of candles on the cake. If you feel old, you already have one foot in the grave. Not me, I have way too much living to do.
I'm now officially out of the USN. However, that is a temporary state of affairs. Turns out the Navy screwed up. I'd gotten out because A. I was sick of beating my head against a glass ceiling & not advancing, & B. My contract was up anyway. WELL, turns out I DID advance, back in February 2006!!!! However, my points got screwed up & never counted. SO, I have to come back into the active reserve, & send a package to DC to have that little issue corrected. Once I GET advanced, I just have to stay in long enough to hit my 20 & I can retire.
We've been hugely busy working on the house. The pool is officially open now, & the kids are loving it. We had a 19 x 14 addition put on the back of the house. It's a sunroom/lanai/whatever you want to call it. It's not quite done yet. They still have to come back in & install the heat/ac unit, & then we'll lay a double layer of padding, & install Pergo. it adds a little over 500 sq ft to the overall house living space. That brings to total sq footage of the house to 2510 or something.
The kids are all out of school. Paul has been promoted to 11th grade provisional(or so we told him) on his passing reading in summer school, which starts on Monday. Boring or not, which he claims it is, he's going. No summer school, no 11th grade, no driver's license, no playing soccer. Capeesh? Needless to say, after flying off the handle & getting into a HUGE fight with his Dad over it, & saying he was running away & not coming back, AND after we had him hauled back from his friend's house by the county sheriff, he saw things our way. Teenagers..... Sarah was promoted to 9th grade, so she's all excited because she's a high schooler now. Little does she realize that she was big girl on campus at the middle school, she's now right back to square one, & is low girl on the totem pole in high school, LOL. She who DETESTS math, & was failing algebra all year made a supreme effort & brought her grade up from an F to a B! We were very proud of her for it. Kyle will be repeating 3rd grade. He's very weak in reading, & they are also going to be testing him for possible learning disabilities. He's also going to summer school starting Monday. Ian sailed through first grade with straight A's, & hopefully will be a little more challenged in 2nd.
At the front of the house, there have also been some major changes. We got tagged by the home owner's association by the yard Nazi's for weeds. SO, we laid 800 feet of sod, added a flower bed around the lone tree in the front yard, laid out a new flower bed so I could plant more roses, (I'm a rose addict) & added 2 little quarter circle beds at the ends of the driveway. The griffins you see in the above photo are what's in the 1/4 circle beds. They are home & drive guardians
The sad note is that we lost a furry family member on June 4th. Tipper, one of our kitties, had been sick all her life. She had a heart condition, which caused a lot of her other medical problems. She passed away in her sleep, & we've buried her along the fence in the back. We are planning a small memory garden for her. She would have been 4 years old in December. We miss her gentle ways, but we're actually thankful that she spent that long with us.
On the rescue front, all is going about as normal. I've turned away more than I can count, in order to be able to care for the ones I currently have until they get adopted. I have 2 girls leaving this morning later for their new home together.
So far as total flukes go, we were struck by a random lightning hit on June 5th, Sarah's 14th birthday. She & I were out bathing suit shopping. If you LOVE horror, take a teenage girls shopping for clothes.....anyway, we get home, to be greeted AT the door, & told that your entire HOUSE is fried. Turns out the bolt hit about 6 FEET from the back door of the addition, traveled through the main ground wire & up into the house. Let's see, so far, we've had to replace the main circuit breaker & upgrade that to the tune of $600, add a surge suppressor to the cicuit breaker for another $100, replace the house phone for $30, replace the motherboard on my computer for another $250, plus I've lost my less than 6 months old 19 inch flat screen monitor, the 3 in 1 printer/scanner/copier, & BOTH of the kids' computers. Who KNOWS what they will cost to replace.
BUT, it COULD have been SO much worse! Things can be replaced, those we love can NOT.
I'm still having a major case of writer's block. I'm really hoping the Muse will come back from the apparently round the world in a million days vacation she didn't tell me she was taking sometime soon!
I'm new here. I'm Lisa in the real world, but my friends call me Storm. I'm a SOON to be 40 year old mother of 5. I have served 15 years in the United States Navy. I have lived in Florida since 1989.
I own & run a non-profit cat rescue, & also co-own with my daughter a show/breeding cattery for purebred Turkish Angoras, which are a rare breed cat. The rescue's name is KitnHevn Inc, & the cattery name is Grimoire Turkish Angoras.
About my beliefs: I'm an Eclectic, I like to study paths of varying styles/cultures, & use in my personal path those things that speak to me. I've studied Greco-Romanic mythology, Santeria, Southern Hoo-Doo, which is more folk magic, still trying to find accurate texts on Voudun/Palo, would LOVE to hear from some of those practitioners out there, Celtic, a bit of Norse, & am currently studying Pictish witchcraft.
Places I would love to visit someday: Number one on my list of places to see before I die in this life would be Stonehenge, I would love to take a trip through all the UK isles to see the castles & stone circles. I would love to see Italy, & travel through Venice in a gondola, I would love to see the temples at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, as well as see the Taj Mahal in person. Some places here in the US I have always wanted to go would be the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National park, & go back to Niagara falls.
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