The Saga of Grammy Lisa: “Good Witch” and Hearer of the Unheard
Outgrowing Fairytales?
Season 1, Installment 1
Moments like this were what made her wonder. She laughed to herself, shaking her head in disbelief at her thoughts, her wavy auburn hair cascading over her black t-shirt. There were a decent handful of whites and grays in it now, strands of starlight as she liked to call them. Unlike so many who dyed them away, to her, they were simply new details, new strokes of color on the canvas of her life.
The cause of her musings today was an interesting “conversation” she had just had with two crows who frequented her yard. One had cawed at her three times and she replied with three clicks, the same sound she used when she fed them peanuts. The other bird cawed four times, the first copied it, and then she clicked four in response as well. To her surprise, the first bird then responded with five in a row, perfectly in sync with her pondering if they would repeat back five. Lisa went over it again in her head, definitely five times so she clicked back the same. Suddenly they flew away.
The rational part of her knew that as smart as they were, crows didn’t have words nor did they know how to count or converse back and forth, but still it seemed too deliberate to be a coincidence. Either way, it did remind her that she should start putting peanuts out for them again. They seemed to only want them seasonally and it was about that time again. Kicking the dragging ends of her slightly too long, purple, unicorn PJ pants out of the way so as to not trip on them, Lisa carefully stood up from the ratty, old, green porch swing. Although nothing hurt much today, care had become a habit made necessary more days than not by chronic pain.
There had been enough moments like this over her life that she trusted the “talk” with the crows had happened though. It hadn’t been a hallucination, just a weird coincidence. Her brow furrowed slightly. No, she wasn’t going to start worrying about the decision to go off of her meds. Once in her adult life, she wanted to not have to take pills every day. She’d cleaned up her diet and was biking every day. Mental health and physical health, especially gut health, were related after all. Damian and the kids had made her promise to go back on the meds if anything went wrong with trying alternative options, but she was so hopeful she would be able to function without them. She hadn’t had any symptoms in years after all, not since she was young. Even her doctor thought it was safe enough to try a run without them as long as she had support.
She managed to tug the stubborn sliding door open after a couple of tries and headed inside to get dinner started. Before she got started, she put some peanuts on the counter by her little coffee maker to remind her to put them out tomorrow morning. The crows certainly weren’t going to eat them in the dark so there was no point in doing it while the sunset was starting to stain the sky, but if she didn’t put them where she would see them she would probably forget tomorrow. Once the peanuts were on the counter, her “talk” with the crows faded to the back of her mind as more immediate real-life concerns like dinner took over.
A few days later, elbow-deep weeding lavender, working peacefully beside dozens of clumsily buzzing bumbles Lisa found herself humming along absently. The scent of lavender was heavy in the air, like she was soaking in it. All of a sudden the tune took shape in the air around her and she followed the notes with her humming, The bumblebees harmonized together, the specific words just beyond her understanding leaving her feeling if she could just focus harder she would be able to make them out. The song strummed through all of her senses of the warmth of summer sun and the sweetness of nectar, but the more effort she put into hearing it the more it escaped her.
The notes slipped away dissolving down into disorganized buzzing. Yet again she shook her head at how silly she was being. While bees did communicate with one another, it wasn’t in harmonizing harvesting songs. She knew that and besides, the notes were already fading, too ephemeral to hold on to. By the time the last weeds were pulled from the bed her moment of harmony with the bees had become just a deeply mindful moment, nothing more than letting herself get lost focusing on nature and plant care. Human brains are too good at finding patterns and shoving things around so they are familiar. Bees don’t sing. Gathering her tools up, she went back inside to figure out the next project that needed doing. The bees’ song was completely forgotten as she considered whether to tackle the rats in the attic or something less complicated.
Curled up on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket with her fluffy tux cat Charlie purring on her lap, Lisa was buried in a book, whiling away the rainy day. She normally devoured books although today she was more lost in thought than functionally reading. Fantasy was her favorite, but science fiction was a close second. Being lost in the images in the words and the magic of creating and sharing the worlds that evolved in the authors’ minds had always been her happy place. That or drawing, or crocheting, or painting, or cooking, or, or, or so many different things! Creativity was her passion, either letting her imagination out to play or basking in the work of others, it didn’t matter to her.
When she was little there was so much more. Imaginary friends, magical adventures, lifetimes spent lost in her own mind. When all of her friends grew past playing pretend and got their feet firmly planted and their thoughts caught up with celebrities, makeup, and boys, Lisa still doodled the escapades of her imaginary friends and wrote stories in her mind to fall asleep. While all her friends grew up, she was left behind although it hadn’t felt that way to her..
That was what had led to the trips to specialists and trials of different medications. After a seemingly unending list of drugs and side effects and years of talk therapy, the doctors and therapists eventually “fixed” her. She had known she would have to grow up eventually, but it wounded her deeply to lose those friends in her mind, the ones only she could talk to. Her parents had been so proud of her for getting focused and working to become a responsible adult. It had felt good to finally make them proud and to take away their fears about how she would manage the adult world.
Lisa had done well for herself, all things told. She had a wonderfully supportive husband who ran his own carpentry business, two charming, well-adjusted children, and her dear grandbaby, Severin, whose toddler chortles lit her heart up and whom she was blessed to be able to care for several days a week. Due to several lucky twists of fate, she didn’t have to work full-time, although she did enjoy her part-time job at The Rainbow’s End, the local New Age-y pagan store downtown, as much as you could call a couple of blocks of a two-lane road a downtown, and it was always her joy to be able to officiate weddings as a pagan minister through the Universal Life Church. It would have been hard for her to pull off full-time work at this point anyway since the fibromyalgia symptoms made her abilities vary widely day by day. Yes, she was definitely a lucky woman even with the challenges she faced.
Paganism had drawn her in young, a big issue in her Catholic family. She resonated with the connection to nature and had never felt comfortable with people who claimed to follow Jesus behaving the unChristlike way so many preachers and people who called themselves “Christian” did. Her parents hadn’t been happy at first, insisting it was a phase, but when she told them she had become a minister her mom had been surprisingly pleased. It could have gone so much worse. Paganism and New Age practices had been so alluring because they allowed people to believe in magic even if. for the most part, they knew what they practiced wasn’t real in a scientifically measurable way at least not with the current technology. Still, it allowed her to keep magic in her life, just like her fantasy novels did. As much as she was supposed to be a responsible grown-up, and even though she played one well enough to pass, she was still in many ways the daydreaming kid with her head stuck in the clouds.
A robocall momentarily jerked her out of her reverie, and as the rain droned on she felt herself nodding off. Charlie was kneading the soft rainbow blanket she was cocooned in, purring loud enough to wake the dead as usual. Something about his purr made her feel safe and cared for, although she knew it was irrational. He was just a cat after all. Even half-asleep she made sure the book was safely cradled on top of the blanket as she drifted off, pondering what would happen if people didn’t have to outgrow fairytales.
Considering all of that, it is not like she ought to have been surprised the next day when, lost in her thoughts, she absently tripped over Charlie and he yelped, “Hey, watch it!”
Startled at having tripped on him, and his words not having completely registered, she immediately apologized, “Oh, I’m sorry Charlie! I should have been watching where I was going.”
Now, talking to the pets was completely normal for her, but the pet in question talking back was quite unexpected so she was completely taken aback when, as he figure-eighted through her legs, he replied, “Meh, you’re a clumsy human. It’s to be expected.”
Stopping in mid-step, she nearly fell over in shock causing him to dart out of the way and settle down on the hardwood a few feet away. She grabbed the sofa for balance and stared at Charlie, blinking hard and shaking her head as though it would settle reality back into place. The cat simply blinked back at her enigmatically.
Lisa didn’t know what to think. Cats don’t talk, at least not like that they don’t! Well, they aren’t supposed to at any rate. She took a deep shaky breath, her heart pounding from the adrenaline and her back twinging from having saved herself from falling. She considered for a moment maybe going off her meds was a bad idea after all. Or maybe it was early-onset dementia? Her mom had been showing signs by this age.
“You know you look very silly standing there gaping at me like a fish,” Charlie gently chided.
Sitting down hard on the arm of the couch, she managed to haul her jaw off the floor. Long-buried memories stirring, she muttered to herself, “This isn’t real. It can’t be.”
The cat held up a paw and examined it carefully before giving an itch a good hard gnaw, then blinked up at her amused, responding dryly, “I’m pretty certain I am indeed real.”
Completely thrown by her current situation, Lisa absently responded, “Yes, you are real, Charlie. I meant you talking to me. That can’t be real. I’m having a hallucination or a delusion or I don’t know what, but this isn’t actually happening.”
“And why are you so sure about that, you silly human?” was his reply. Lisa noted she didn’t see his mouth move at all, but she clearly heard his words in her ears not just in her mind. Oddly enough he sounded familiar like she always imagined he would, but of course he would since this was just her imagination playing tricks.
Already in the habit of talking to herself and to the pets, she replied as though having a conversation with her cat was as normal as buying bananas at the store, “Because cats don’t talk like people do.”
“I’m not talking like people do. That would be beneath me. I am a cat after all.” He sounded mildly insulted and she swore that if he could have made air quotes around, “like people do,” he would have.
She knew the tricks to use on an unruly brain and, once she got her racing heart under control, she was growing more curious than freaked out, “Well fine then, how are you talking if it’s not like people do?”
His eyes twinkled, “Magic, obviously. Don’t you remember?”
Season 1, Installment 2 From the Mouths of Babes
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