Taking a last look around the witch’s garden and the moon garden before the first fall frosts does its work. What to bring inside, what to pluck and what to say goodbye to. A look at what worked this year and didn’t.
A Time Traveler’s Primer
It’s midnight, I’ve been walking. I’m staring up at my bedroom window, one dim light shining through. The same window I looked out on as child. I’ve been to many places, many streets, lived in many towns, stared up at many windows. I didn’t expect to be this age, staring up at that window again. […]
Dear Mr. Musk: Before starting your own Utopia, perhaps you should take a look at history?
New Harmony, Indiana was the site of two utopian experiments. The beauty of the town is intact, thanks to a sweet old lady with oil money to spend. But the experiments were distinct failures. From the History Trekker: If colonizing Mars can save humanity, why can’t you apply those same principles at home and save […]
Why a moon garden #3: Brugmansia tree bursts into bloom and lights up the moon garden
I admit I had doubts it would do it. The USDA lists our plant hardiness zone as 6b, which isn’t exactly this plant’s natural habitat. But it did it. There was a single bloom which last four or five days, and as it was dying off the whole trees burst into bloom. The first bloom would […]
Eating Poe: Part Three, Poe’s life New York City, where he found fame, tragedy and madness, and I search Il Buco for The Cask of Amontillado
It’s a tantalizing legend, that the building that now houses Il Buco in New York City was the macabre inspiration in Poe’s life for the setting of The Cask of Amontillado. The places Poe touched in Manhattan and the Bronx can still be found, though in most cases the surroundings are unrecognizable from his day. So […]
The Fairy Pedant by W.B. Yeats, 1895
NEAR THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Irish poet William Butler Yeats became actively involved in magical circles, joining The Golden Dawn, one of the legendary occult societies of the time. Yeats would say that it was a “chief influence upon his thought.” Yeats believed in fairies, not in the abstract, but as real creatures, […]
Watcher In The Woods by Dora Sigerson Shorter, 1906
Excerpt from from the book “The Story and Song of Black Roderick” AND I BID THEE REMEMBER how the little pale bride was wont to sit upon the mountain and watch the far lights in her father’s home quench themselves one by one. So now of how she died shall I tell thee, and of what […]
Queen of the Haunted Dell, by M.V. Ingram, Authenticated history of the Bell Witch, 1894.
https://youtu.be/WfdMbOIpGG4 Ingram wasn’t a poet by nature perhaps, but he made a great song lyricist. Colorful, but simple and short, unlike most of the poets of the age. He chose the moment before the Bell Witch first made her appearance to Betsy, when life was sane and magical, in a good sort of way. The […]
