Genetic Tendencies

We like witches in our family. I guess. They keep popping up in family stories. I think my mother had a lot to do with it. Well-behaved women, history, and all that.  She had a soft spot for witches.
She did a great witch's cackle and was often called upon to do it. I also remember a skirt she had when I was very little that was long and flowing and had moons on it. I called it her witch skirt. It was dressy and elegant, not the least bit costume-ish, but the moons reminded me of my favorite book at that age, The Witch of Hissing Hill. The name stuck. My mother liked it (but she’d also bought the book).

Whenever Marie Laveau played on the radio, someone always ran and turned it up.
Hazel?  The witch on Bugs Bunny with the spinning bobby pins?  We thought she rocked.

Our family’s sailboat was named the Water Witch. An unrelated story behind the name, but there's that word again.

So years later, the angel atop my mother's Christmas tree was fair game. It was a corn husk angel, and old, so her skirts were dry and curled...windblown? Perhaps. She's holding a trumpet, but it’s kind of droopy now, and one could conceivably mistake it for a wand if one looked quickly. If one was two and had a cool Granny.

My daughter was two, and had a cool Granny. She also lisped (she's thirteen now, and does not). We'd stopped at my mother's for a quick visit on our way home. Frances ran in, ahead of her sister, to see my mother's Christmas tree. She came charging back to the kitchen, eyes wide and delighted, to report to her sister, "A WITth. Granny has a WITth on her tree!"

My mother was tickled. With the idea, and with my daughter's delight. The shadowed sense of humor evident at such a young age (heart clutch) ... the legacy lives on.