Please fence me in (I want to drum with witches)

Previous blog/ Master List/ Next blog

When our Tarot Blog Hop wrangler, Joy Vernon, posted the topic for this hop, I had to laugh. “Don’t fence me in” was the exact opposite of what going on in my life.

This spring, my wife decided to use her inheritance from her mother’s death last summer to pay for house and garden repairs and upgrades. One of the things that my wife has wanted for years is a privacy fence. And after many, many years, she had talked me around to her position. If nothing else, I no longer wanted to look at the dead brown knee high grass that my southern neighbor insists on having.

Plus for many years, I have wanted to have “Dark Arts and Crafts” parties. You know—weird artists, indie writers, crazed magicians, and amusing witches, possibly armed with drums and wands—all making noise around a fire pit. One of my entry points into the local occult community was the monthly drummings that a friend of mine (Cassandra Ravenwolf) used to have over at her house. I met my wife at such a drumming. I was heart-broken when Cassandra left town with her husband (Brian) to be closer to her in-laws. And I have waited patiently for some other member of the community to create such an event…but after fifteen years (maybe a touch more), I am out of patience.

So my wife and I are getting a new sidewalk (goodbye Sidewalk of Death), traded our chain link fence for a nice wooden one, new front windows and doors, got the garden sheds painted. Plus I am doing a major purge of stuff I do not need (“Oh look, it is a stack of Rocky Mountain newspapers—didn’t they go out of business ten years ago?”); so far, three whole SUV loads of newspapers have been taken to the recycling center. Plus we are going to be painting some of the inside rooms of the house, building some custom book shelves, and generally organizing the mess.

(Please note that one of the reasons that this is all happening is that I am fairly stable—well, more stable than I was for the first fifty years of my life—on my current round of meds and a pot chaser. Don’t knock my pot chaser—it helps keeps the migraines and panic attacks at bay.)

The work on the outside should be done by the beginning of August. Then I get to switch my attention to Icarus--science fiction—“A thousand people live and work in outer space. They depend on Earth for a supply line. What do they do to survive when Earth goes dark?”—a rather long project that has much in common with eating an elephant “one bite at a time.”

So what the heck does this have to do with the Tarot? (An important question given that this is the Tarot Blog Hop.) Well, after all this is done, a certain amount of ritual and classes will be attempted at my house, and I might be doing some in-person Tarot readings (I hate reading Tarot over the phone and internet). So for the sake of my business (and my wife’s pottery business), we needed a new fence.

"Do you want to see naked witches dancing?"

Previous blog/ Master List/ Next blog