I had this twitchy feeling that my grandma's secret room would be
unlocked, that fascinating tower room at the apex of our two hundred
year old house, which some people jokingly called not a house, but a
castle. Don't ask me how I knew that little room was unlocked. Witch
blood runs strong in the Cerri family and we all sense things, even the
very smallest things, like a door that is carefully sealed each time
it's left, but now,---was intriguingly open.
You would think living at Wildcroft Cove, a village only fifteen miles from Salem, that we'd have at least part English heritage, but, oh, no,---we are all Italian, and of the Old Ways. Our family is from Tuscany where the sacred tradition of Aradia started, the mysterious goddess leader, the charismatic fourteenth century woman who left behind ancient, and as most think, scandalously lewd and eccentric lessons...
My very wealthy ancestor Rosemunda was an infamous beauty, an evil faerie-learned woman, a heartless temptress, who fascinated every man who saw her and who also followed those Old Aradia Ways. This was her country estate house, where she took her elite friends to our circle of standing stones in the woods, the circle surrounded by ancient gnarled oaks. There in the night mists, dressed in white gauze, waving her flashing silver athame toward the full moon, Rosemunda would lead the rituals. I've known this since my early childhood.
One of the first things that was my responsibility as the youngest girl child in our matriarchal family was to care for our household guardian Befana, to dust and clean the doll in her niche in the parlor, to give Befana fresh flowers in her dry, old hair in the spring and summer and sweet, sharp-scented maple leaves in the fall and even dried red rose hips from our faerie roses in the winter, the small white roses that encircled and also grew thirty feet up into our huge Russian mulberry tree.
But, now, I continued to climb the spiral staircase to my grandma's tower room, looking up, up, up. Clear diamond-paned windows cross-hatched with lead were set in the horsehair-plastered walls to let in light. The old stairs creaked every few steps. The railing was beautifully made as was every piece of woodwork in this grand old house. You'd never know unless you looked very closely that it wasn't carved out of one long sinuous length, like a twisted white serpent. I gazed upward, upward...
I had wanted for years and years to see the sequestered tower room where I knew my Grandma Lila kept her potions, her handmade oils, ointments, washes and dusts, those very magical things that she'd created all her adult life for practically every human condition or problem. Grandma Lila was in her late sixties, but she still had her hourglass figure and was as spry as a goat. Her wavy black hair was streaked with iron gray and she had piercing purplish-gray eyes, eyes the color of cascades of heavy rain running down the nine foot tall windows of our living room.
As I climbed and climbed, the stairs became not as well-cared for, not even half as meticulously maintained as the rest of the house. Even some of the delicately-formed spindles were missing; the wood was unpainted. Up and up I went, five stories, until I stood on the landing in front of a narrow door, a door only a couple of feet wide and about five feet tall. An averaged-sized adult would have to turn sideways and stoop to get through it. I reached out, gently touched the latch.
The door sprang open as if it was on springs. My beautiful older sister Matilda jumped up with a ringing cry from a little brass bed, quickly clutching a white flannel sheet to her breasts. Her long, curly red-gold hair was wild around her face, her long-lashed goldish brown eyes were as wide and crystalline as a doll's. A dark-haired young man of about twenty leaped up from the bed, charged through the door and down the stairs, his denim shirt tails flapping, his muscular chest heaving.
"What the flaming hell are you doing here, Tatiana?," my sister screamed at me.
I put my hands on my hips, and leaned forward from my waist. "And, what were you doing here..., " I shot back at her, pointing my arm back toward the open door and the stairs, "...with him?" --- Copyright by Antoinette Beard/Sorelle Sucere 2021.
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