The end of Mike D.

Ostara was born April 9^th, 2010.  We hurried home from our Honeymoon to see her.  She was so beautiful!  Jay and I were just enamored with her.  She would be the first of over 20 goats to be born on this property. 

Ostara was not the only new being on our farm that spring.  On March 21^st, Spring Equinox (Ostara) Kat came into our lives.  She was Mike D.’s friend from Pennsylvania.  We had met her at Mike D.’s son’s Wiccaning during PPD.  Kat then when thru a bad break up. Mike D. decided to ask Kat to move in with them.  He consulted with neither his wife nor me until after the fact.  Mike D. promised Kat that he will pay some of her bills, while she looks for work.  Until then he asked her to help out around the house, help watch the kids, and drive his mom around.  Mike D. broke his promise, never paid any of her bills, and basically uses Kat like slave labor. 

Jay lost his job at the dialysis center in June of 2010. He spent the next few months looking for work in his field.  There seems to be a lot of gender discrimination here, in that hospitals and Dr’s offices don’t want to hire men.  They only want women.  Men who are in the medical field and are not Dr’s are often seen as less than.  I wonder if it is because they only see women as nurturers. 

Things with Mike D. continued to deteriorate. I had not been involved in his coven in almost a year.  I was in another coven that was lead by a woman that he basically considered to be the enemy.  I finally reached my breaking point with him after we had a conversation on my front porch one night.  One of his coven members had recently left and began studying with another coven in town.  She had a very bad car wreck and was in a comma for three days.  Mike D. said to me, “you know it is on the tip of my tongue to say that she deserved it for leaving the coven.”  I knew at that moment I wanted him off my property and out of my life. 

The next day I called her coven leader, an elder in the community and my friend.  When he heard what Mike D. had said, he lost his whole mind and started pacing up and down his house screaming, “I didn’t know it was a competition!”  The elder’s husband got on the phone and told me, “In our 10+ years of marriage, I have never seen him so upset.”  To curse her like that was unacceptable.

We began to encourage Mike D., gently, to search for his own house. It took a few months for them to find one.  When he did he told Kat that she could not move with them.  I in my infinite stupidity, gave her a lame and convoluted excuse, and told her she would not stay in the house after he left. 

We helped Mike D. pack.  That packing helped confirm my suspicions on what kind of Pagan he was.  His Pagan book hoard contained two books: Buckland’s big blue book of magic and a book by a pagan author friend that he had had dedicated to his wife.  Now you have to understand that for the majority of Pagans, a huge part of their faith is seeking knowledge.  The seeker must seek.  Any Pagan leader, worth their salt, has a large collection of books that they refer to and / or teach from.  We call this their book hoard.  You’ve got to remember that before the internet were books, and even today a good majority of pagan knowledge is not online.  Hell a lot of is not even in print.  I never heard Mike D. quote from a pagan book, I never heard him say, “you know I just read an article online about,” enlighten anyone around him on anything pagan, or explain why or how he did things as a witch.  Never.  Actives you would expect out of a 3^rd degree high priest. 

His altar was also covered in dust and not one of the first things he packed.  Obviously it was not important to him.  In fact he left many of his magical items in that house.  Now an altar to a pagan is one of the most sacred spaces in the home.  It may contain statues of deities and ritual tools.  It is also usually well tended with drink and /or food, and cleaned on a regular basis.  It is an import place to focus, to do magic, and to worship. It is as sacred to us as churches are to some people.  Taking all of these things into consideration, it confirmed something I had felt for a while.  Mike D. was playing at being Pagan.  He was in it for the power, not the knowledge or for the worship of the Gods. 

Mike D. really showed his true colors after he moved in his new house.  He knew Kat was staying in the old house and that she was going to move in a few weeks.  That bastard turned the water off on the house, while she was still in it.  He did this to a woman he called friend.  Kat lived in that house for two weeks with no water!  She would then drive her car down to my house, fill up buckets of water, put them on the trunk of her car and drive them back up the hill to her house.  She would come to my house to shower and eat.  What dislike and disdain I had for Mike D. grew exponentially everyday as I watched her live like that.  Kat left us on Fall Equinox (Mabon) 2010. 

In the end my good deed did not go unpunished.  I had rescued Mike D. and he had mauled me in thanks.  By the time he left my life he had trashed Momma Muriel’s house, stole from us and owed us money.  We later found out that we were not the first in town he had done this to.  We tried to sue him, but the lawyer we used ended up getting disbarred.  So we never got out stuff or our money back. 

Kat and I remain friends to this day.  She married a man that had been in Velvet’s coven.  They have a beautiful 2 year old and recently came to visit me.  They live in Norfolk, Virginia.

Mike D. and his family would eventually go back up north, to New Jersey, where he had come from. He would reconvert, become Catholic and join the Knights of Columbus.   I feel he was in many ways a carpetbagger: someone from up north, who moves South to take advantage of Southerns, and then goes back to where they came from.  Mike D. is the kind of Yankee that leaves a bad taste in Southerners mouths.

After Mike D. left, Jay and I went back to living our normal, old, boring lives.

Ilsa