You all, it’s been a long time. I’ve settled in back in Cambridge, delivered my first full moon broths (let me know if you’re in the Boston area and want to join my list! there will be cookies!), scrutinized my last Conventicle missive, and I’ve landed here at Substack because I’m hoping that what I’ll make for us all here won’t be about my writing so much as about all of our work. Our kin work, our community work, our memory work, our word work. So yes, writing. But also : us. I know some of you; I want you to know each other, and I want to learn from you. I will open weekly threads about recipes, the old things we live with, our ancestor mysteries and discoveries and devotions, books we’re reading, calendrical observances…you know, annsister stuff.
This month I’m devoting myself to the witches of winter. I’ve got one on the shelf next to my oven, and I feed her cookies, salt, spelt, garlic, and cakes of sugar. Another has settled herself at the back of my head, clearing cobwebs and snipping and smoothing the threads that I trail along behind me. She mutters memories to me, and advice. She is old and she is concerned with baking, and burning.
The Abenaki names recorded for this moon-month were about spruce tips fallen on snow, about falling boughs laden with snow. In Old Britain, the first days of February were for weather divination, and for honoring the end of Mary’s 40 day period of lying-in. In with the new: evergreens were replaced with box, one poem records, and candles were lit all day for Candlemas. While in New England this hardly feels like the beginning of spring but rather the dead center of winter (the Abenaki month of “crust on snow” feels just right), I am asking myself how the dream sequence of post-holiday resolves into the ferocious scouring energy of Spring Cleaning. The Ancient Romans swept their homes with pine branches (februa): it was the month of ritual purifications, including cleaning and offering to the hearth and honoring their dead. As I wrote about in November: death and the living hearth, the crone and the ancestors and the cakes we bake for life, close cousins.
And so, Befana who sweeps my fireplace and leaves my children cookies at the end of the Solstice season becomes the gingerbread witch who sweeps herself into the hot oven and shuts the door behind her, leaving a clean hearth and a new year ready to begin.
con·ven·ti·cle
/kənˈven(t)ək(ə)l/
nounhistorical
noun: conventicle; plural noun: conventicles
a secret or unlawful religious meeting, typically of people with nonconformist views.