[no image in epub file]
A Memoir
Finding Magic in
Modern Times
Misty Bell Stiers
Witch, Please: A Memoir
Finding Magic in Modern Times
Copyright © 2018 by Misty Bell Stiers
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover and interior illustrations and calligraphy by Misty Bell Stiers.
Cover design by Misty Bell Stiers and Rain Saukas.
Interior design by Rain Saukas.
Print ISBN: 978-1-948062-03-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948062-10-7
Printed in the United States of America
For Samaire and Wylie, who remind me every time they smile
we must truly be made of stars;
and Sam, where all the magic in my life originates.
Contents
Everyone Deserves the Chance to Fly
Introduction
We stood there on the overlook, staring out at the endless stars reflected in the glacial lake below. I had never seen so many. The Milky Way tore across the sky over the miles of forest that surrounded us. The silence enveloping us wasn’t silence at all but myriad sighs and whispers that spoke of an abundance of life just out of sight. It truly felt, for that moment, as if nowhere else in the world existed—as if no one else in the world existed. There was only us, and the magnificence of what surrounded us.
It had taken time to get here. I had first met Sam just four years prior, despite the fact that I had grown up around a good deal of his family and he already knew most of my friends. Over the years, these friends had tried to set him up with pretty much every last one of their single friends but me, convinced Sam and I could never possibly get along. (We also lived in different cities for a long time, so I can perhaps forgive them for skipping over me in their matchmaking campaigns.) And truthfully, their assumptions about our possibly incompatible natures weren’t too far off the mark. We had a few fiery conversations right at the beginning . . . but they seemed to always drift on into the wee hours once we laid down our verbal weapons and started to really get to know each other. We spent many a night lost in conversation standing next to our cars, stars fading above us as the sun snuck over the horizon.
That said, it wasn’t until the wedding of his cousin to a friend of mine that we truly connected. He was an usher and I was the photographer, and an hour before the ceremony we found ourselves being drafted to stand in for the happy couple at the altar so the videographer could set up the shot. It was the first time in almost a decade that I had returned to my childhood church, and I was more than a little on edge. In the years that had passed, I had long since left the soaring ceilings and statues of saints behind for something many might have viewed as an utter failure of my many years of religious education, but had felt to me like coming home. Now here I was in the very place that was supposed to be home, and an overwhelming feeling of not-belonging was haunting me more than a little. As I stood at the altar, awkwardly avoiding eye contact with Sam and any of the aforementioned statues surrounding us, I muttered, “You might want to keep your distance; the odds are good that I’ll be struck by lightning any moment.” In response, Sam turned me to him, saying, “Well, I suppose we’ll get struck down together.” What followed were a series of perhaps obnoxiously irreverent vows, given where we were—“I promise to remember your name tomorrow,” “I guess we’re getting married, then”—that left both of us still smiling long after the videographer sighed and walked away.
He stuck with me, that one. A week after the wedding, I found Sam’s smile looking back at me from my computer in what seemed like every shot I’d taken, and I somehow knew he would become more than just a passing acquaintance. We saw each other a few times in the coming months, a truly fun birthday night among friends at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill, and dates, just the two of us, to see They Might Be Giants, as well as a night with Béla Fleck and Tim Reynolds, but despite the pull he exerted on my heart, I consciously turned away. I stopped returning phone calls and answering emails. I took the coward’s way out for fear if I did anything else I’d change my mind. I had my sights set on an upcoming move from Kansas to New York. Moving to The City had been a lifelong dream, and I wasn’t going to gamble on anything that might distract me from getting there. It had meant too much to me for too long. I didn’t want to leave a part of me behind. I knew I needed all I had to make it work.
Sam took that decision in stride and, over a year later, when he found himself in New York for work, he gave me a call. The two of us and a dear mutual friend spent the weekend exploring the city, staying up entirely too late, and drinking entirely too much. Days later Sam was back in Chicago, and suddenly New York, the city that trades in teeming sidewalks and sardine-packed subway cars, felt more than a bit empty. I knew then I was really goners. There was no walking away from this man a second time.
So I didn’t. Despite distance and time, we figured it all out, and now here we were, feeling like the only people in a vast, amazing world, just four months before we would say our wedding vows for real this time.
Sam had brought me to his family’s cabin in Montana to show me what was, in many ways, his true home. My love had lived in what seemed an endless number of towns and cities growing up, moving from refinery to refinery with his dad’s job as an engineer with Conoco. But the stories he told most often, the pictures he chose to hang on our walls—somehow, they always circled back around to this place. Here, next to him, there was no mistaking it: this was, if ever there had been such a place, where Sam belonged.
Sam wasn’t a believer in organized religion. He had been raised Christian, but held little connection to any church. From the moment I met him, I had known that he was, in every way, his own man—and that included his spiritual practice. He knew what he believed, and he lived it. And he knew from the beginning what I believed, and he supported me in it. He celebrated the changing of the seasons with me, the rise and fall of the light and