“So, what sorts of magic have you been doing recently?” my brother asks.
I look up from the box of soil that sits between us, one hand steadying the seedling that I am potting up. It is fragile, still, the dirt more than heavy enough to crush it, and my fingers form both support for its thin stalk and protection as I move it into its slightly larger home. We’re still weeks off from the last frost, so what will become the summer garden is still kept in the basement of their house, lines of small plants thriving in artificial sunlight below the earth. I was here to plant them – I am here now that they have grown enough to need more soil.
“I haven’t really been doing much,” I say, and I can hear the disappointment in my own voice. “Haven’t really had the energy, what with…” I gesture, encompassing the world and all its many tasks. “Packing, and traveling, and paperwork, and such. It’s a fallow period. It’ll come back.”
They look, as always, a little amused. “Uh huh,” they say, noncommittal, and hand me another seedling.
That night they boil down the maple sap from the tree out front. This is the first year of realizing it’s a sugar maple, and we all hover near the kitchen as jar after jar of clear liquid evaporates into steam, rendering a half-cup of light brown syrup that tastes faintly of candy.
“I should pour a little of this back onto the roots,” they say thoughtfully as we dip spoons in and argue about whether to reduce it any more. “Pay it back.”
“Why wouldn’t you give it something from your world?” I ask, jostling close to the stove so that I can smell the steam. It reminds me of burned sugar, but the two scents are unmistakably different. “It gave you something of itself.”
“You want me to give it blood?” they ask, curious and unbothered. “That would be the parallel.”
I grin. “Well not this much blood, certainly.”
I remember the house where I grew up, and the garden out back that nicked me when I asked it for some soil. I remember the house before that, which swallowed up my father’s wedding ring.
“I’ll think on it,” they reassure me, and I wonder if they are thinking about the sacrifices of a season’s growth in the same way that I am. I know that they have blood in this land, but my practice is my own. They’ll find a payment that works for them.
Maple trees with taps and buckets for collecting sap, to be made into maple syrup, at Beaver Meadow Audubon Center, North Java, NY. [Dave Pape, Wikimedia Commons, public domain]
Last fall, during my visit, I helped with slaughtering. Now, I am here when a doe rabbit has her first litter of the season. It’s a mixed bag – she’s lost two kits by the time we realize she’s delivered. The third one is fat with milk and grunts when we move it, checking to make sure it’s healthy and warm.
My brother-in-law casually tucks one of the little corpses against his body, lending it heat just in case this is one of the rare occasions when a healthy kit is too cold to seem alive. “He’s brought back two like this,” my brother says with pride, and I swallow down superstition and fear as I wrap an arm around their shoulders. The kit is curled against their husband’s belly, eight months full of their son. I remind myself that our practices are different, and I hold my tongue as the kit settles far enough into rigor mortis to be unmistakable.
That night I feel their son beneath my hand, his father’s stomach shifting as he settles into place, preparing for his own arrival. In his crib, the blessing I have knitted him is folded and waiting. I started it before he was conceived, a wish and a protection that I have worked on in conferences, on the train, when I should be packing. I left the unfinished skeins of it out two months ago, to gather Brigid’s blessings on her holy day. It isn’t safe for a baby to have a blanket too young. Still, I wish I could wrap it around him now, ensure that he is warm and safe before he even arrives.
His father doesn’t hold with such things. The charms he weaves will not be recognizable to me as charms, the protections too secret and too mundane for me to register, too private to discuss. We hardly talk about our practices, our careful curiosity tinged with the knowledge that we’re both sure the other is going to seem… off. Not wrong, exactly. Different. Transposed, neither of our approaches would work for the other. The few times we’ve collaborated have been careful negotiations, two languages broken down to create a third, built from the ground up.
My brother and I have more history together, more of a shared understanding. Our magic has an easy familiarity, even when we disagree. I am only beginning to see pieces of how they talk to their husband, the common, distant world in which they’ve built their home. I am shocked when I learn that, before my niece was born, her parents called her a name taken from Lucifer’s host until they could settle on something lasting. Laughing, this time they have borrowed the name of a saint for her brother and know that it will carry no weight when he arrives and is himself. I, meanwhile, give so much importance to names that I have hidden my own under possibility and allusion. Their laughter is baffling to me. I let it be a reassurance. Something is germinating. They have planted and will harvest it. They know how to tend it best.
Albert Martin at maple syrup time near Fernleigh- unknown date. [Wikimedia Commons]
The steam from the maple syrup fills the whole kitchen and rolls out into the living room. My brother hovers over it, watching it closely, and glances out the window. “We could do this in the fire pit,” they say. “That’s how folks used to do it.”
I grin. “We need to get you a cauldron,” I say. “Stick a big pot on top of the fire, have you cackle over it with steam pouring over you. Make you a proper witch.”
They scoff at me. “It’s very normal to do this outside!” they say. “Besides, I need a shallow pot.”
“And a fire pit with stars and moons on the side,” I needle them. “And a wide brimmed hat. And a black cat with one eye.”
“It’s just food!” they exclaim. “Besides, my parents gave me that fire pit.”
“Because you picked it out,” their husband offers, and I cackle.
“Bah,” they say, eyes twinkling, and gesture imperiously. “Now, bring me that spreadsheet, Luke. We’re going to plan the garden.”
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