We Remember || ONC2022

Our phone rang about an hour after Alder left our cottage with the good news that he was alive and back in Saltash. Auntie didn't tell whoever was on the line that I had received him from the sea or that we had breakfasted with him at our kitchen table. The Remembering was now a party, a celebration, a giving of thanks for his return. It was a Returning.

Good thing we had assumed as much and already started our baking. By early afternoon, my lemon tarts were cooling, each topped with a delicate, sugared beachberry garnish, and Pim and Una were waiting on our scones in the oven. Una loved scones. The sun was high in the sky, the tide was out, and the beach was calling to me, so I took a break from the kitchen.

The cold wind of the early morning had gone out with the tide, so in my loose, linen overalls and giant, floppy straw hat, I answered the call of the sea. Even though the briny scent of the bay traveled on our clothes and clung to our hair, snuck through doors and open windows, permeated every dwelling in our coastal town, there was nothing like the wall of thick, salty air that hit you on the shore.

I abandoned my sandals at the point where the beach turned more sand than pebble. Stretching out my bare arms, the sun's heat soaked into my skin. I loved the crackle it made, like fire or electricity, like bubbling champagne, just underneath the surface. I was Goddess blessed to never burn in the sun.

Pim and my father had light brown skin, my mother white, while I was some combination of them all. Always a golden tan, even in the fieriest summers and the gloomiest winters. Except no one in my family had this corn silk hair or eyes as dark as mine, almost black as obsidian. It wasn't unusual to see a mixed family in Saltash. Pim believed that this land, the cape below the canal that divided Crone's Bend from the mainland, was so diverse because of the history of magick here.

If our books were to be believed, at one time this little cape had drawn sea witches from all over the world and they were welcomed. There's an illustration in one text that depicts our bay filled with fishing boats, practitioners of different races at every bow charming the day's catch into the nets. These witches made their homes and families here, changing the ethnic and racial makeup of the area. If this was a true history, I didn't know.

Though I loved it here, couldn't imagine myself away from this sea and sand, that didn't mean that I believed there was anything especially appealing to cunning folk about Saltash or Crone's Bend over any other beach town in the world. Why would they have been pulled here in particular? Whatever the truth, the magick had long since washed from the blood of the people, for the most part. Pim and I and two others further up the cape, were proof that there was still a little magick here.

Pim claimed that when she was a child, the oldest villagers bragged about having a witch on their family trees. But their children's children had grown up and grown wary of us cunning folk. There must be many inhabitants of Crone's Bend with magickal ancestry, but Pim and I were some of the last practitioners left.

I'd often wondered if the reason that magick didn't bloom here anymore was because the people's fear and suspicion did not provide hospitable ground in which the Goddess's gifts could bloom. If we believed the books, however, those cunning folk had made at least one lasting impact on this cape, because the ethnic and racial diversity, not to mention a variety of pagan traditions, remained.

And that was one thing that I loved about Saltash, this bounty of difference. Even if I didn't exactly fit with the people here. When I turned eighteen this spring, the Naval Academy had come to our door. A practitioner who could call forth a tempest was a powerful weapon for a military to have, and increasingly rare. I could have traveled the world by sea, experienced differences that I only glimpsed here. But I had no desire for war.