Homage to Latonia Barto

Death comes for us all.  No one is getting out of here alive.  It is inevitable.  How we live between birth and death is what matters, not how it ends.  Every death touches us all.  Each life lost is a detriment to the entire world.  We are all human: gay, straight, cisgenered, transgendered, Muslim, Christian, Pagan, Democrat, Republican, Black, White, Yankee, and Southerner.

I’ve known love, and I’ve known loss.  One thing I know for sure is we all return, whether in animal or human form, or as a single drop of rain.  We as beings, both human and otherwise, seek this life, this existence.  We choose this life. 

The dead tell me what they crave the most is being with the living.  Being with the ones they left behind.  They can do little more than watch.  All life that passes away returns to us, if we are smart enough to see it.  It is a circle, ebbing and flowing without end, endlessly repeating.  It is dizzying, mesmerizing and heart breaking all at once.

My thoughts have turned to death, because earlier this week my beloved friend and spiritual soul sister LaTonia passed threw the veil.  She was a beautiful, kind, loving woman who never believed in limits or labels.  I pray she finds peace and rest on the other side.  For the last 7 years she battled Leiomyosarcoma, or smooth muscle cancer, but she was so much more then cancer.  She was a constant fountain of giving and creating.  She was a talented artist in what ever medium she chose. 

Those of you following along know that I met Melinda in a yarn meeting and that we were part of a group called Chicks-with-Sticks.  I have been into fiber arts since I was 11 and re-learned to crochet at Barbara’s feet.  Oma had taught me when I was little, in fact it is part of my first memory, but I forgot as I got older.  I have continued crocheting most of my life, learning to knit, weave, spin, sew, and tat along the way.  If it has a needle involved I want to learn to do it. 

I met LaTonia many years ago in a Chicks-with-Sticks meeting.  For many years we all coexisted happily together.  When Melinda and I parted company (Billy the Exterminator) I basically left the group.  I did not want to run the chance of seeing Melinda.  I went to one more meeting around Christmas to find out that the lady who ran Chicks-with-Sticks, was leaving.  Her work had changed and she was tired of all of the drama that Melinda and I brought to the group, all though she never put it like that.  It was all implied.  I was ashamed and embarrassed that I had caused so much trouble, so I left and did not come back for many years.

A chance meeting with LaTonia one day at the Pines Road Library brought it all back into perspective.  She threw her arms around me and just held me so tight.  She said, “Where have you been?  I’ve missed you!”  I told her how bad I felt about breaking up the group, and that I didn’t want to run back into Melinda.  She said that there was a new group called “Yarn Play.”  They were meeting at the same time, in the same place, with most of the same people, minus Melinda.  She had not been around in some time.  She invited me back.  I told her I already had Druid on Saturday, but I would try to see if I could balance two meetings at once. 

I did.  I came back and it was like I never left.  I joined my sisters in stitching and bitching ever Saturday.  When I stopped going to Druid after all the problems I had with D&K (Goat Problems) Yarn Play became as close to a coven as I had, for more than a year.  Although almost every woman there was a Christian, they were the women I went to with questions, my hopes, my joys, my fears.  They were my tribe of elders, although many of them were my age or younger.  Since Juno and I patched things up and I went back to my Druid meetings, I am back to balancing both meetings.  Yarn play in the mornings and Druid in the afternoons. 

LaTonia’s health was never far from our minds, especially towards the end.  Once we all got settled with our knitting or crochet projects, and if she was not there, we would ask where she was and how she was fairing.  LaTonia I think often shared with us, and not with many others, at least part of her struggle.  She once told me she stopped telling her extended family what was going on with her medically ‘cause she could not handle the drama.  I think they often saw her as broken and fragile, when she was perfectly capable, she just had cancer.  What stories were shared in Yarn Play I will not print here.  We keep each other’s confidences, and confessions. 

LaTonia continued to create beautiful and inspiring pieces of fiber art, whether in crochet or knit.  I don’t think she knew how to not create.  She made blankets for the Linus Project, hats for the cancer center, creating even when her hands shook. As I began to understand that her time was growing short, I encouraged her to begin looking at her projects still in progress, or “on the needle” as we say, and decide who should finish them and what should happen to them.  Last Saturday I watched as friend bound off a blanket LaTonia had been working on for about a year.  I knew if she had finally given up her projects, she was letting go.  I knew it would not be long.  She died the next day.

In November 2015, I began to write my first real novel, which is at the moment called “The Treehouse.”  LaTonia’s beauty and artistic ability became the inspiration for one of my main characters, who I named Anne.  Her beautiful son Gabe, became the inspiration for Anne’s son, and namesake.  I would call or message her with questions I had, about growing up biracial, Gabe, and motherhood.  We became even closer.  I gave her all that I had written.  One of the great joys of my life came at my 40^th birthday, when she told me she liked what I had written and had made a connection with Anne.  It was the greatest complement she could have ever given me, and I cried.  As LaTonia began to slip from us, I felt as if Anne was dying as well.  Since her death, it has taken me some weeks to get back to working on my book. 

I had had a phone conversation with LaTonia about a week before she passed away.  She told me she was not ready, that she wanted to stay.  She fought until the end striving to stay around for her son and her husband.  I asked her one time if she knew how long she had left to live.  She said, “I don’t want to know.”  She believed having an idea of the date of her death, would limit the quality of her life.  Latonia was a woman who always beat the odds.  Most of those diagnosed with her type of cancer live 3 years from time of diagnosis, 5 if you are lucky, she lived 7.  I believe because she attacked the disease both physically, emotionally and spiritually. 

She was a complex woman with a complicated history, just like all of us are.  Her smile, zest for life, optimism, patience, smile, laugh, and encouragement to those around us was infectious.  Her’s was a life lived fearlessly in love and compassion.  We are all the better for having known her. 

Ilsa

My Mother - Part 2

Beau and I continued emailing, instant messaging, and phone calling for almost a year.  I learned I had 2 sisters and a brother outside of Tyler, Texas.  That his new wife had a daughter in Carthage.  I made plans to meet her soon.  Not long after I spoke with my siblings on the phone for the first time.  They had not always known of my existence.  They were of some age before they were told.  It was not long before we all became friends on Facebook.  

My relationship with Beau continued for almost a year.  His new wife did not like me much.  When I told her I wanted to come up with her daughter and her grandchildren to see Beau, I was told, “When my grandchildren come to see me, I want to visit with them, not you.  Y’all are always so needy.”  I would call and she would not give him the phone.  He was in the shower, at work, in the shop, or taking a nap.  Finally I began to understand that one or both of them did not want to talk to me anymore.  He promised me things that still have not come about.  I sent him a message and told him that I saw him as a coward, because he would not stand up and fight for me against his wife.*

I still get a birthday email from him, but I have little communication with him other than that.  I did not tell my mother I had been in contact with Beau until it was all over with.  Keeping that secret from her was one of the hardest things I have ever done. 

I told Jay that for my 36^th birthday, I wanted to meet my siblings.  So in March of 2012 plans were made to meet and visit with them.  I asked my mom to watch the farm for me, so she spent the night.  The house had been cleaned top to bottom, before she came to stay.  As I got in the truck I told her we would be meeting at my siblings mother’s house.  “You’re going to Sandy’s house.  The woman your father left me for,” she said.  I told her yes.  She walked in the house and that would be one of the last conversation she and I would have for 2 ½ years.  I have never heard her call Beau my father at any other time in my life, before or since.

We drove to Texas on a Saturday morning.  We met that afternoon.  Oh I will never forget seeing JM, my baby brother, for the first time.  He just embraced me and would not let me go.  I instantly fell in love with him.  JM stared back at me with the same brown eyes, that I saw every day.  The same ones that so many times in my life I had wanted to ripe out.  No one in my family had brown eyes but me.  But JM did.  I never understood why I am artistic. But JM did, he’s an incredible metal artist and painter.  I just could not physically let go of him.  I felt he would slip away.  My sister Ashley was beautiful, warm, loving, and a really good mom. My sister Elisha and I had history.

When I was a senior in high school Elisha had been having trouble in her life.  She transferred to my school and lived with family.  One of the cousins had warned me that she intended to whoop my ass, because of the way I talked about Beau.  I avoided her at all costs.  She never got a hold of me.  Years later our meeting would be tense, but cordial. 

In later conversations with my siblings I would find that Beau really could have cared less for Elisha and Ashley.  He loved them, but took no interest in their lives. It was JM he lavished attention on.  A cross that JM still caries to this day, that he was more loved by Beau then his sisters were. 

Sandy, Beau’s second wife, was gracious and pleasant to me.  I am not sure that I could have done the same thing in her spot.  I sat and talked with her for a few minutes to show her the few treasured photos I had of Beau.  I also showed her photos of my mother in the hospital.  She never knew.  She told me, she had not known about me, until later in her and Beau’s relationship.  Out of respect for my mother I have had very limited contact with Sandy. 

 I had the best time visiting with my family.  I was coming home, riding on a cloud.  I felt so good.  I could not stop smiling.  My face hurt from smiling so much.  I felt whole for one of the first times in my life.  I got a call from my mom.  I don’t remember what she told me.  She made allusions to the fact that I was with Sandy, and I had better come find somebody else to watch my farm, because she was leaving.  I hung up with her and called Melinda.  It would still be a few hours before I was home. 

Melinda was there when I arrived.  My goats were screaming.  When we looked in on them we found grain on the ground.  I had explained to my mother very clearly that you have to put the grain in their bowls, or they will not eat.  So basically my goats had not eaten in two days.  No wonder they were screaming.  They were starving! 

Punka was lying in a pile of her own piss.  She had obviously not been peed that morning.  There were dirty dishes in my sink, when the dishwasher was empty and magazines thrown about my bedroom floor.  If I had done this in my mother’s home, she would have said that I had “trashed” it.  There was a nasty note taped to my refrigerator.  Basically don’t call me, I’ll call you.  I was devastated.  I sank in the chair and cried.  I don’t care what you do to me, but YOU DON’T EVER FUCK WITH MY ANIMALS!  We took poor Punka, peed her, and bathed her.  Poor child, I have no idea how she was like that. 

It took us a day or two, but we began to notice things that were missing.  Weird things, some things my mother had given me: my red lawn chair and a bag of oranges.  I would not notice the main thing for six months.  My Oma had a large collection of amber.  In Germany it is considered very valuable.  We have large pieces and necklaces that had been passed down in the family.  I wore these pieces in ritual.  My mother knew this.  I thought they were locked in the safe. 

I made a new apron dress, and from it’s hooks I intended to hang my three large strands of amber.  I went looking for them.  I could not find them.  I tore up the house looking for them.  I could not find them.  Finally I put in a call to my father, who I still had a relationship with.  He laughed.  “You just now realized they are gone.  Yeh your mom took them to punish you!”  I wanted to come through the phone and strangle both of them.  I said you need to return them to me now.  You have 24 hours or I will call the cops.  He told me, “No.”  Twenty four hours later I called the cops on her ass.  Oh that shut her up!  Within a few hours one of the three strands was returned to me.  To this day she says she cannot find the other two.  I believe that is a bold faced lie.  Either that or Holda has hid them from her, so she cannot find them.  

My mother stole them from what I call my working altar, where my book of shadows lies.  I still in many ways consider it a hate crime.  Imagine if someone came in to your church and stole your candle sticks off the altar, same kind of thing.  The only reason she did not steal the rest of my amber is it was locked up in the safe. 

I finally called the cops off of her.  Mom said they belonged to her, and I said they belonged to me.  There was no documentation either way.  I begged her to get counseling.  She refused.  She would tell me later that she stole from me because, she was afraid I was going to move in with Sandy and like her better.  What???  I’m a grown ass woman, with a husband, a home, a farm, and animals.  Yes I am going to sell everything and move in with her.  How fucking stupid can you get!  So she decides to hurt me, because she can’t get over her own shit?  Fuck her!  It’s been 35 years!  Give it up and move on!

After she robbed me, we did not speak for 2 ½ years.  We began talking about 9 months ago, two days before her stroke, because I could no longer stand to see my father in such distress over us not speaking.  It is only for my love of him that I do this.  My relationship with my mother is still complex and difficult at times.  I have slipped up and told her that I loved her a few times, since we began speaking again.  I don’t know after what she has done to me, if I will ever really love her again.  I damn sure don’t trust her. 

She has begged me for forgiveness, and tried to explain her actions.  I have told her repeatedly that forgiveness is a Christian concept and one I am not obligated to follow it.  We are our deeds.  She must take culpability for her actions in her life, and how she treats others.  I believe she will never do that.  I had a councilor once tell me that given the father my mother had, it is surprising she learned to love at all.  I learned long ago, the kind of love she gives, I don’t want.

Ilsa

*Beau would tell me years later when I reestablished a relationship with him that, he had felt like I “put him on trial.”  I was very much my mother’s mouth piece.  Beau was the one who avoiding me, Nancy was being protective of him.

 

My Mother - part 1

I think in order to really understand my relationship with Melinda you kind of have to understand my relationship with my mom.  My relationship with my mother has always been complex.  My first memories are not of her, they are of Oma.  Since Oma died I have continued to look for that unconditional loving mother figure in my life.  I had it for a while in Momma Muriel and I thought in Melinda as well. I would ultimately find in it in my relationship with Holda. 

As a small child I believed my mother to be my big sister, and my Oma to be my real mother.  My mother is not right, whether she was born that way or as a result of the surgery I don’t know. Read about that here in HelloIlsa, Goodbye Beau.  She is very narcissistic, everything must be about her. 

I remember one time being in the fertility Dr’s office for a vaginal ultrasound, my mom is there for support, holding my hand, because with IC it is quite painful.  The lights go off and suddenly she starts telling the Dr and nurses, about how her husband left, when she was in the hospital with brain surgery, when I was two.  I had to tell her to, “Shut the fuck up!” I said “Nobody wants to hear that now!”  She could not stand, for just a few moments the attention was on me. 

When I call to talk to her, she immediately launches into her day. I had to train her to ask me how my day was.  She does it about 50% of the time now.  Most days she still forgets.  

I am fiercely protective of my mother, always have been.  I would end up being the same way with Melinda.  In many ways I feel I raised my mother.  My father and I became her emotional care takers after Oma died.   Mom started in college when I was 13.  I helped out and  did a lot of the housework, and then sat down at night to help her with her homework.  My father wrote all of her college papers.  Her successes felt like my successes. 

Since Oma’s death I have had to walk on eggshells around Mom.  Her love always comes with strings attached.  “I love you, but you’d be so pretty if you just lost weight,” was the main way I remember her telling me she loved me as a child. 

Despite cleaning my home before she came, I was always told how dirty my house was.  I remember one day when I was living in Apartment C in college, Mom came to visit and helped me clean.  She took a q-tip to the seal of my refrigerator door and found mold.  She held it up in my face and said, “See!  Your fucking nasty just like Beau!”  If she does that shit now, I just hold the door open and tell her to leave.  No one will insult me in my own home!  My Mother always did everything she could, to always make me feel inferior. 

Love was always conditional with her, and I never knew when she would throw me out of the family, like I had seen her do to so many others.  I have always said, “My mother loves me, but she does not like me.”  No matter what I did, I could never please her.  It was just never enough.  I wonder if sometimes she looks at me, and sees Beau.

After my mother robbed me on March 31^st of 2012, Melinda very much became my mother.  She allowed me to do things that at 36, my mother still forbade me from doing.   Stupid me was still wanting to please my mom at that age.  Small things like to dye my hair red and get double holes in my ears.  Simple things of self expression, that my mom assured me, would not look good on me.  It took me a long time to understand,  that control and manipulation does not equal love. 

You’re sitting there shaking your head, rereading the above paragraph.  Yes you read it right.  My mother did rob me.  Now let me explain to you why, and that’s going to take a moment.  So get another glass of iced tea and I will tell you the story.  Told you this was going to be a long, but good story.  I’ll wait.  Back now.  Okay so lets continue.

My biological father, Beau, left when I was two.  I have seen him once more and that’s when I was 6.  He came to pick me up for my birthday.  I was taken to a huge, what I guess was family reunion.  I was put in a play pen with a baby.  Her name was Elisha and I was told she was my sister.  Beau took me fishing, and we dug for worms.  I had a great time.  I came home and I was so excited!  I was jumping up and down and screaming, “Momma I have a sister!  I have a sister!”  She whirled around from washing dishes and said, “If it didn’t come out of me, it ain’t no relation to you.”  I was devastated.  For one afternoon I had family and in one breath she took it from me, again. 

Questions about Beau were met with hostility and some disgust, both at him for who he was, and what he did, but also at me for asking.  In college I had to do an eye color chart for biology.  I had to track eye color in the family and find out what was dominate and what was recessive.  I contacted Bobby Joe, one of Beau’s cousins.  One of the few of his family members I had been allowed to speak to all these years. 

I sat with Bobby Joe and his wife for several hours one day,  looking at old pictures and trying to put together this chart. It was to Bobby Joe that I began to ask those long held questions.  He gave me a beautiful picture of Beau, my mom, and me.  I had only seen the cut out version before. Bobby Joe was also able to confirm that Beau’s father was in question.  So In the end I had to guess, about the eye chart.  I worked really hard to get the C in Biology and graduate that year. 

It had taken me tremendous courage to go behind my mother’s back and ask Bobby Joe those questions.    To see pictures of my ancestors, to find out things about who I was genetically, also felt like I was betraying both Jef, my step father, and my mother.  I did not try again for many, many years. 

There were attempts to find Beau over the years, especially once the Internet came about.  But it is kind of hard to find the right James Smith.  There are millions of them.  Finally in the Summer of 2009 I told Jay that I wanted to contact Beau.  I had hoped that speaking to him, might clear up the blockage in my 1^st and 2^nd chakras.  It has not, to my knowledge. 

I rang Bobby Joe, who said he did not have Beau’s number, but another cousin might.  I called the cousin, who said, “I have an old number for him.  I have no idea if it will still work.  I have not had contact with him in some time.”  The phone number worked.  In the space of less than a half an hour I had found my biological father.  He was living in Northern Pennsylvania.  With a new wife, who was not Sandy.  Jay sat beside me, holding the gumbo pot should my nerves fail and I needed to vomit.  He told me he always knew one day I would find him, when the time was right.  We had both been trying to find each other on Ancestry.com, but had not yet made the connection.  Questions I had had for many years were asked, some accusations were made, some truth was told and I am sure some lies as well.  I hung up after 2 hours, and promptly vomited from all the pent up nerves.  That was the first time I ever remember him telling me he loved me. 

Ilsa

Billy the Exterminator

At some point Melinda went home.  Tami still wanted to help Melinda, so she called in a few favors.  From her days at the Zoo, Tami knew the guys from “Billy the Exterminator,” she called and asked if they would be willing to spray Melinda’s house.  They agreed if they could film it.  Melinda went back and forth, yes, no, yes, no, okay with conditions.  Finally in the end, it was decided that it would be okay to shoot the house, but she would not be there.  If I wanted to be on TV so bad, then I would have to fill in for Melinda, and so I did.  Tami came along to do my makeup and as moral support.  So in September of 2012 we taped an episode for “Billy the Exterminator.”

Now I had been on and off the phone with Melinda all day, trying to make this happen.  At one point, she said she was going to lock the house, and not let anyone in.  I finally convinced her not to do that.  When we got on the set that day, one of the producers came up to me, and said Melinda had called them and left messages.  And I should listen to them, because they were about me.  I know my mind most of the time, and I knew to hear them would not be good.  I said, “ Once I hear them, I can’t unheard them,” so I asked Tami to listen to them for me.  She did and came back shaken up.  “They’re bad Ilsa.  They are really bad.”

 Melinda had left two messages, and in them basically threw me under the bus.  She had apparently told the producers, all about my mental health issues.  They didn’t need to know any of that. I felt betrayed.  After Tami told me, I looked at her and the producer and said, “I’m done with her after today.  I wash my hands of Melinda.” 

We had a wonderful day of shooting.  I really enjoyed Billy, but mostly I really fell in love with the crew.  My reward at the end of the day was a picture of me and Billy together, hot and tired, but having done a good job.  I made sure that everyone involved were respectful of Melinda’s home, and knew that she had placed curses on one of the gates, and not to go thru it.  Most of what you saw in the tape was correct, as far as the bugs were concerned.  What you do not know, is that kitchen had been cleaned at least three times, since the first night we had gone in with shovels.  No, it was not my rent house.    That was a lie we came up with, so it would seem plausible why I was there.

There were things that happened, after the taping of the show, that I was not aware of until later, when Tami told me.  Apparently a meeting was held of all those there, on whether to call CPS or not, because of the condition of the home, and once they understood a child lived there.  They decided against it.  They would later tell Tami, that they had never been in a filthier house. That in order to really attack her bug problem, the house should be tented.  There was also talk that the house should also be condemned. 

Jay picked me up from Melinda’s house and we went home.  I have never spoken to Melinda since then.  What few items she had left here I returned to her.  Including her belt for Holda’s Hands which I returned in pieces, just like my heart was.

It was close to Mabon at that point.  I picked up the phone and called the HP.  I wanted to find out what day Mabon was going to be celebrated, what time, and what they wanted me to bring for the feast afterward.  I told the HP all about what had happened with Melinda and I, that I was done with her, and that I wanted to come home.  Now I had watched others move in and out of the HP coven, even returning after spending long periods of time away.  Nothing was ever said about it.  I remember the HP being very angry with me.  I think she felt I had chosen my coven over hers.  She told me Melinda had disrespected her and her wife’s marriage.  Melinda had made inappropriate comments to her and apparently groped the HP’s wife.  I never understood all of why the HP was angry with me, and it has been a long time since that phone call, so please forgive my sketchy details.  Within a few days I received a Facebook message telling me that , they sent me forward in love and light, to cut and burn my cord and to never set foot back on their property again. 

I was devastated.  My coven had fractured because of Melinda and all her lies, and now I was being thrown out of my other spiritual home.  It was like those days after Momma Muriel had died.  I felt I would break apart.  I know now, years later that Holda was moving me ahead of the game, like a chess piece.  She was moving me ahead of things she did not want me involved in.  I am ever grateful for her wisdom and her protection.

Somehow we soldiered on.  Juno took it really hard.  She was still trying to play mediator and fix Melinda and I’s relationship.  She was trying to be friends with both, and it was hard on her.  Juno has always identified as a Druid.  I had known Boogie and Rovena for many years.  They were some of my oldest friends in the community, elders really.  So I rang up Rovena and asked what they were doing these days.  She told me she was running an ADF (Ar nDraiocht Fein) proto-grove.  I told her of Juno, and that I would like to bring her round.  I didn’t want her to feel like she was the only Druid in town.  And so one day we went. 

Ilsa

Melinda goes to Jail

 In August of 2012 Melinda went to Jail.   She had always been funny about the police.  She had told us she had been sexual assaulted by an officer many years before.  One night in early August, she and her boyfriend were coming back from Alexandria, in her truck, and for whatever reason the cops in her town pulled her over, about 5 miles from her house.  The truck was registered in one of her son’s name, and the insurance was also in his name.  Melinda produced an expired out of state license.  Her boyfriend also produced an out of state license, as he had recently moved to Louisiana.  Melinda had been in Louisiana for 11 years.  She always gave me some bull shit about, somebody else had stolen her identity, and that’s why she had never got a new license.  I do believe she had a state issued ID however.  They usually don’t run you when you get those.

Since they were out of state, the police officer ran a nationwide search on their licenses.  My guess is to make sure the truck was not stolen.  Melinda’s boyfriend came up clean, but Melinda’s past had come back to haunt her.  She popped on a warrant out of Tennessee.  She was wanted for stealing an excess of $10,000.  The warrant seemed to have been issued about the time she moved to Louisiana.  She called me crying, told me she was being arrested, and to come and get JB. I got in the car and immediately drove the 15 or so miles to her. 

Melinda was booked into jail, and spent the next 17 days there while things were sorted out.  I was not involved in the process to bond her out, and after a few days one of JB’s brothers came to get him.  I think he had about 5 brothers or so.  I wrote Melinda in jail, went to see her, did what I could for her, and talked to her the phone.  Our Lughnasa ritual that year, consisted of us talking to her in jail.  We were on the phone in ritual circle, telling her how much we believed in her innocence, and how much we loved her.

About that time I had a conversation with one of her sons, because some of this stuff was just not adding up.   I begin to ask him a host of questions such as:

Is your mother a witch?  Did she raise your pagan?  Was your grandmother really a witch?  Is there a family tradition of witches in your family?  He told me no to all the above, and that as far as he knew, his mother had been raised a Jehovah Witness, and still was.

I asked him if she had worked as contractor and built houses, as she told us she had.  He said No.  That she had worked with them in the office, but never in the field.  Which made since to me.  Melinda had been having electrical problems for a long time in her house.  She said she knew all about electricity, but would not fix her problems.  A few weeks before she was arrested, Melinda had seen sparks coming from a socket in her bedroom.  She replaced it herself.   On our workday, Jay looked at the socket.  He found it was improperly installed.  He told me that if he had not fixed it could have burned the house down.  Now don’t you think someone with electrical experience should know how to redo a simple socket? 

I finally asked Melinda’s son if he thought the charges against his mother could be true?  Could she have really stolen the money?  He said, while he thought she would never steal from an individual, he believed she could defiantly steal from a company. 

This made a lot of since to me, occasionally she would tell me she had to borrow against her check. She told me she had something to do with payroll.  I knew she bought heavily on Ebay.  In cleaning out her house I found what had been an old bathroom, full of Ebay boxes.  Most of them contained yarn.  She called it her yarn room.  It was stacked floor to ceiling. It was on of those rooms that if you opened the door you would kill yourself.   It just did not add up.  Melinda was very poor, where in the hell was she getting money for that much yarn? 

Melinda was fired while she was in jail.  When she asked to come and get her things, she was told that the lawyers had advised against it.  She was told that everything she had had her hands on was now being scrutinized by accountants.  I still have no idea, if she had been stealing from her current job.  I have heard rumors, but I will not print them here.  It was my guess that if she was not allowed back on the property, she probable had been, and it had probable been a lot.

Melinda would spend her 50^th birthday in jail.  While she was there, she called to tell us that she thought she was pregnant.  This ruse she would keep up for months, even after she and were no long friends.  Melinda had told Juno, the baby was not viable, or she had miscarried. I forget which one.  We ran into Melinda’s old boyfriend some years later, he told us they had finally gone to the dr., who told them  she not pregnant.  When she insisted, she was.  The Dr. told them they had run the test twice and not only was she not pregnant, she had not been pregnant at any time as of late.  We were not the only ones she was conning.  

When Melinda got out of jail she refused to go home.  Even with JB she did not want to be alone in that house, so JB stayed with his brother, and she came to live with me.   That lasted all of two weeks.  You never really know someone, until you live with them.  Melinda showed us her true colors during that time. 

My feelings towards Melinda, as oh-highly-exalted-one, had begun to change that summer, as I watched the way she treated JB and me, while we worked so hard to clean her house.  There were few thank you’s, lots of discussion on how we had done it things wrong, and her unwillingness to help in most of that project.  I still have no idea if she cleaned between the times I was there.  I was beginning to see that everything was about Melinda.

On the one year anniversary of my hospitalization, I could feel my stress level rising.  I had a feeling that I was going to have another attack, and I was right.    Melinda had taken to cleaning my house, doing the wash and the cooking, all the while telling me how I was doing it wrong.  I never asked her to do any of that, she just took it upon herself.  I remember getting frustrated at Melinda, and going to be in my bedroom. I was sitting in Princess’ bed when Jay walked in.  I told him, “I’m going to pop.   You’ve got to get her out of my house!”  He said, “She’s your friend.  You get her out.” 

Within a few minutes I was in a full blown panic attack.  My pills did not help and I regressed to about 6 years old.  I spent most of that day coloring.  I was not taken to the hospital, to my great relief.  We knew it would pass.  Melinda could not have been more wonderful to me, while all this was going on.  She sat and colored with me, and fixed me grill cheese sandwiches.  It took most of the day, to “grow up,” but by the time I went to bed that night I felt like my normal self.  No one outside the family, and doctors had ever seen me have an attack.

I was still in counseling with Barb at the time.  I had a session with her not long after my attack.  I told her what was going on with Melinda.  Barb told me I needed to set boundaries with her.  I needed to start telling her, “No.” I did and that’s when things started getting really ugly. 

JB had gone back to school and had broken his arm.  Now whether his bullies did it, or he did it on accident, I was never really clear on.  So Melinda was terrified to drive, so we went to pick up JB and take him to the hospital.  He is in quite a bit of pain at this point.  Melinda is insistent that we must stop at the library to make copies, and then to the post office. “I must get Tennessee off my back,” she kept insisting.  She was more concerned about her own shit, then her child’s own pain.

The warrant Melinda had been arrested on was expired, but had never been taken out of the system.  When she called the clerk’s office, to find out who had filed charges against her, the folder was blank.  At least that is what she told me.  Who knows if it was true?  All they could tell her is the date that the incident was said to have occurred and where.  Melinda was released when Tennessee decided, they did not want her.  She was trying to prove her innocence, by mailing affidavits that she was not even in the county, where this had occurred, on the date in question. 

So she made me make all these stops, before we even could really get going, to take JB to the hospital.  We were about 15 miles from her house when she says, “Stop!  We’ve got to go back to the house.  I forgot to get the ham.”

“No Melinda.  I am tried, JB is hurting.  There are other things to eat at my house.”  I said.  I also knew that ham was more than two weeks old, and probable no good.  Melinda becomes angry and suddenly hits her phone hard against the car door.  Now it was a nice day and were ridding with the windows down.  So when she hit the phone against the door, it suddenly goes flying out the window, going 60 mph.  Melinda yells at me to pull over.  She has to have her phone.  I did, and I let her and JB search for it.  I was getting really tired of her attitude, the way she was treating me, and I was feeling like I was being used.

Ilsa

Holda's Hands

So when Melinda came into my life she, at first, she offered me that unconditional love I so craved.  She encouraged and empowered me, or so I felt. 

It was never my intention to leave the HP coven.  I felt in many ways we had hived off.  The HP coven had grown so large, that I felt we were just taking the overflow.  I did not spend Yule with the HP coven.  Melinda and I spent it together.  I went to the HP at Imbolc with the express idea of leaving for good.  In a private moment between us, I told her this.  She begged me to stay, and blessed me.  I agreed.  I told her of Holda’s Hands and she said that was a good thing, and encouraged me to keep doing it.  Ostara of 2012 was the last time I would stand in the HP circle.  I left my besom, Hagatha, there as a sign I would return.  That eventually I would come home. I never would.

At Beltane 2012 we officially dedicated Holda’s Hands.  Tired of never getting anywhere with the corded belt system, so common in Wicca, I made belts for all our members who held a position.  It was a way to add distinction our group.  We even sewed charms on them, to show where we had been in our spiritual path.  Melinda and I decided to co-lead, we chose to use the triple goddess aspect in our leadership.  Melinda was initiated as the crone, her daughter Vicky as the maiden, and I as the mother.  Juno was initiated as Bard, a musician and storyteller.  It was a happy day for all of us. 

No story exists in a vacuum. Events in our lives are all inter-layered like a good cake. There was a lot going on with me then. Juno and her wife Kay came into our lives during that spring.  Melinda had met them, at a knitting group off shot, she used to hold at Books-a-Million.  We loved them immediately.  We tucked them into our lives and we all became fast friends. 

Tami had also joined my life about that time.  In the Fall of 2011 I was just swimming in goats milk.  I was getting sick of making cheese.  One night laying in bed, we were watching a “Billy the Exterminator,” marathon.    The show was filmed locally.  Billy would find injured wildlife and take them to the Cypress Black Bayou Zoo.  I asked Jay, “You think they could use some goat’s milk, for all those babies?”  He said yes, and we contacted them soon after. 

Tami was basically running the place.  We came by one day to drop off milk.  They were terrible grateful, but busy as usual.  Saving babies takes a lot of effort.  We were given the tour of the place.  They had 4 beautiful goats.  I commented on how lovely they were and that we had goats.  Tami shocked us by asking if we would like them.  We talked it over and decided to take 2 of them, Muffin and Patches.  We brought them home and would rename them Bridget and Morgan.  Bridget is a fat, little, gray and white pigmy goat.  She is spoiled rotten and still with us.  Morgan would eventually go to live with Melinda, along with her babies Anu and Danu. 

Tami, her hubby, her son, and all there animals were living in at 35’ travel trailer, when I met them.  She and I had hit it off almost immediately.  She was an animal lover and a spiritual seeker.  We began to talk about her moving into Momma Muriel’s house, as it had been vacant since Mike D. had left, but needed repairs.  They moved to the farm in May of 2012, and into the house in August of that year.  Tami’s menagerie included dogs, cats, birds, and a little gray, Vietnamese Pot Belly Pig named Henry.  

After a while we tucked Henry in with the goats.  He is wonderful and gentle with them. He would lay on his side, and the goat babies would just use him as a spring board.  Tami would move from the farm to her own home, a few miles away, in August 2014.  We never could figure out how to move Henry, who was now over 200lb., without traumatizing him, so he stayed with us.  Mr. Henry still lives with Star and Kali in the pen. I am looking at his happy piggy butt right now, out my window, as he is eating some grass, and wagging his happy piggy tail.  I’m not into pigs, but I sure do love this one.  He will even sit for a cookie, Tami taught him that one. 

I had known Melinda about two years at that point.  She often mentioned how messy her house was.  Tami and I told her that we would love to help her clean.  It took some convincing, but Melinda finally let us in her house in the Summer of 2012.  I know why she had trepidations about this.  Melinda had a secret.  She was a hoarder. 

The first night Tami and I went in with shovels.  We shoveled dog shit and trash from her kitchen floor for many hours.  The German Roaches, you know the little ones, were insane.  We came home and Tami did right, she stripped off all her clothes, before she got in her house.  She would later burn them.  I should have done the same thing.  Melinda’s lasting gift to me, for helping her clean, was I got roaches that would not go away. I would fight them on and off for more than a year, before they finally went away.  I should have stripped and burned my clothes too, but I did not.  I had the sensation of bugs crawling all over me for days afterwards. 

I would go back into that house many more times.  To clean out refrigerators that were not working, and one day to wash all her dishes.  JB and I worked hard one morning and got 5 bags of trash cleaned out of the living room and the kitchen.  We were outside taking a break, when she came home from work for lunch.  She flew into a rage when she saw all the bags, screaming at us and tearing them open to see what we had thrown away.  Then yelling at us about what we had thrown away.  Poor little JB, who was only about 13 or 14 at the time, had been so proud of what he had done, just wept.  I had the impression that whatever he did for her, was never enough, was never done the right way.  I would come to see that side of her myself first hand.

JB and I spent one day washing every dish in Melinda’s house.  I would wash, he would dry and we both clean out the cabinets trying to vacuum up dead bugs and fecal matter.  We spent hours doing this.  Melinda was at work.  We knew she would be so pleased, when she came home.  All day long I had been using a sponge with a scrubby side on it.  It was the only thing available.  She came in, and told both of us that we had done it all wrong, that all of the dishes would have to be washed again, because we had used the scrubby side.  And as everyone knows, the scrubby side would cause microscopic scratches, that would let germs grow.  I was deeply, deeply hurt.  It was thank you, but you did it wrong.  I was beginning to see why JB had cried.

Vicky had left some time before, and moved in with her new husband.  She could not take the pressure of Melinda anymore.  JB and I had done a tremendous amount of work.  We had gotten the kitchen, living room, pantry, and some of the hallway cleared.  Every day I came in, we started at square one, picking up trash and dog shit. 

I started on Vicky’s room.  It took me 2 or 3 days to dig it out.  It was buried in about a foot of dirty clothes, trash, and sprinkled with cat shit.  I had to wear a mask.  When I started on that room, which was a good, 15 x 20, I could not get the door open, but about 6 inches.  Slowly it came.  I have no idea how many bags of garbage I pulled out of that room.  But I do know I pulled out 9 laundry bags full of dirty clothes, shoes, belts and purses, but mostly clothes. 

I am very glad I at least did that. Melinda had her room, but I never could figure out where JB slept.  It took me a while, to dig a path, to even get to where his old room was.  Of course you could not get in it.  It was covered in junk and trash.  After we cleaned out Vicky’s room, JB turned it into his room.  He made a pallet on the floor and that is where he slept.  I believe that JB had been sleeping on the couch in the living room for years.  He had no dresser to hold clean clothes, hell most of the time he only had just a little bit of that, he had no place for his books, he had almost nothing to call his own in that house. 

Washing clothes was always hard in that house.  Of to the right of the living room was a hallway that was treacherous and covered in stuff.  That led to a set of stairs.  At the base of the stairs was a very large room maybe 30 x 30, covered in stuff about a foot deep.  I could tell you there were pieces of furniture, but I have no idea what else was in there. I never dared go in that room.  I stopped at the stairs.

To the left of that room, was a washroom.  Only JB was nimble enough to get in there.  We did not know until later, that the water heater was busted, and had been leaking into what was the washroom and other large room, until we saw water pouring out between the house and the foundation one day. It had started to grow black mold.  We had no idea how long this had been going on.  The room adjacent to the washroom was covered in about 6 inches of water and furniture had begun to float.  I have no idea how long it had been like that.  Melinda seemed to suddenly be shocked at the condition of this room and blamed it all on Vicky and how she could not keep house. 

After JB and I had worked all day, she did not come home and help.  Nope she simply went in her room, often times closing the door.  As if we were the peasants, the hired help and she was too good to help.  Even some days complaining how bad her back hurt her.  One day we called a work day at her house, with the rest of the coven.  She sat in her chair the whole day and did not lift a finger.  Melinda was beginning to show her true colors in the way she was treating everyone and I was starting to get really pissed about all this.  I felt I was in a way being conned. That’s when it all started to unravel, like we were frogging a knitting project.

Ilsa

Meet Melinda

I know I am back tracking her just a bit, but in May of 2010 Melinda entered my life.  I had found a knitting and crochet group online that she was part of.  It was called Chicks with Sticks.  At our first meeting Melinda, her daughter Vicky, and I talked about a great many things.  After everyone left the room I closed the door and mouthed the words to her, “are you a witch?”  If her friends did not know, I did not want to out her.  She looked at her daughter and then said, “Yes.”  I will never know if Melinda actually was a witch, or simply saw that as an in to exploit me.  Three years after the end of our relationship I still don’t know, nor do I know if anything she ever told me was true.

Melinda could be brash and arrogant, and both were infectious to me.  She was very bright, carried herself with a certain air, and had loads of love to give.  Melinda filled that gaping void in my life left by my mother and I’s relationship.  With my mother she freely gives loves, but you find out later there are always strings attached.  After my mother robbed me on March 31^st, 2012, (hang on we will get to that part eventually) Melinda became very much my mother.  It was an honor she would ultimately betray. 

By September of 2011 Melinda and I had been hanging out a lot.  We were great buddies and our lives were very much intertwined.  I had brought her out one night to meet the HP, both she and her son JB.  Kind of a meet and greet.  I did not know that Melinda, had at that time, said something inappropriate, and disrespectful to the HP and her wife.   I would not know that for almost a year.  We spent Samhain (Halloween) 2011 at the HP coven.  As the Mother had prophesied, the HP coven continued to grow.  That night there were over 20 pagans in that circle. 

I am all water sign, Pisces, Cancer, Cancer.  I am emotional, I am malleable and in many ways gullible.  I will often bend to the will of those around me, in order to please them.  A high ranking member from long ago had reentered the HP’s coven.  She became again the HP’s right hand woman.  They had been friends for many years. I became jealous, arrogant, cocky and snotty to this woman, who had never done me any harm.  I had been working and studying to be the HP’s right hand woman, or so I felt.  I felt slighted in thinking that this woman could just come in and steal all my glory.  I was the star pupil.  I wanted the HP to love me best and chose me.  I was petty and I was wrong, and I wonder if I was also not a little power hungry. 

We sat one night and confronted each other.  She was nothing, but gracious to me.  The goddess was telling me to take a back seat and I was not listening.  I was fighting with all my will.  I had, since I could remember, wanted to be a “shaman,” my word for a spiritual healer and spiritual leader.  I had been thru several paths, but now believed I was on the right one, and this woman was stopping that progress.  I felt I was being pushed out and ignored. I was so in the wrong.  It should have been about worshiping the Gods and it was not.  I never got to the chance to apologize to the HP about how sorry I was.  I hope she can hear me now.  I apologize to both of them in anything I may have said in thought, word or deed towards them. 

In November 2011, it was finally cool enough that we could have a retreat at the HP house.  A lot of things when wrong that weekend.  I felt slighted, that I, an initiated member, had not been asked to consult on anything related to the retreat.  Don’t feel that way now.  I had not seen Jay, but about 10 hours that week.  He was working 60-80 hours a week, and was out of town two days a week with Unifirst.  I was late getting to the retreat that Friday night.  Jay had been off working. My tent was huge and needed two people to set it up, and I didn’t remember how to do it.  It was hell trying to set up the tent, in the dark, at 10 o’clock at night.  I was also against a deadline.  Melinda, me and the ladies from Chicks with Sticks, were trying to make sure there would be enough blankets, for us to give away at the nursing home that Christmas.  I spent almost every waking moment working on those blankets.  That weekend included. 

I like many others, I consider handwork (crochet, knitting, spinning, weaving, embroidery, etc) to be a form of magic making, a form of spell work.  My HP did not see it that way.  She considered it disrespectful for me to be doing this while she was teaching.  Melinda and a friend, were due to come in later in the day and visit.  Melinda was snotty towards all those there.  She was apparently again disrespectful to the HP’s wife, something that would be kept hidden from me for almost a year. 

There were elements of the retreat I did not like and wondered why we did them.  When the HP asked if I had problems with the retreat I lied, and told her, “NO.”  I did not want to upset or disappoint her, which I kept doing, or so it seemed.  I know she did not like my relationship with some of those I considered elders.  She at one point considered me like a mole.  I would go to the elders and say, “oh how was your ritual.  We had 21 at our Samhain.”  Although I never told them anything else about the rituals or who was there, she felt I betrayed her. 

I was working at the time on trying to create a larger pagan community, that might one day work together.  Trying to get the groups around here to work together, must less acknowledge each other was a mighty task, and one I would eventually give up.  Nobody around here wants to play together, and when there are already so few of us, that is just kind of sad. 

She and I had it out, or so I thought early that December.  I was tormented.  She would dance around the idea of who this “Mole” was, but it was not until I said something on our private Facebook group that she acknowledged it was me.  A few days later I was removed from that group, a group I started.  They never told me they had.  I had to figure that one out for myself. 

Somewhere in here I had asked Maddie to give me a card reading.  To see if she could figure out what had happened to me in August and why it had happened.  Her reading strongly advised me to get into counseling.  And so almost 10 years since I left, I went back into counseling.  My first meeting with Barb was December 22^nd, 2011.  She and I would meet every two weeks until her retirement in July of 2015. 

I felt slighted by all that was going on in my HP coven.  I felt I was being pushed out.  That I was no longer wanted.  I was really kind of upset about the handwork thing.  It was so much a part of my life, part of my dedication to Holda.  Melinda and I had been back and forth about starting our own group.   At that time my nose was so far up Melinda’s ass I don’t know what I was thinking half the time.  We decided we wanted to start a group that had handwork as part of it’s center.  Where we could crochet and knit and worship the Gods and share stories at the same time.  So at Yule (December 21^st, Winter Solstice) 2011 Holda’s Hands was born. 

Ilsa