You’ve always loved counting things.
Not composing massive lists or numbering the listing piles of folded sheets on the ladder-back dining room chairs your grandfather left you. Not calculating how close you are to a gross of chicken vertebrae, a dozen raccoon skulls, or a pair—so rare—of unicorn tails. Your counting is of a different sort.
You rise early—not as early as your dads did when you were still in school, moving wraithlike in the pre-dawn gloom—but early enough to listen to the birds and collect dew from the azaleas, before the sun steals it away to sculpt cumulus clouds to adorn the afternoon.
You make your bed, counting the corners, checking they’re the same as when you went to sleep (corners have a habit of splitting, budding new shadows overnight). You make a pot of rosehip tea, counting out just enough petals to read your future into next week. You know tomorrow is too near a horizon, August still distant. A week is just right. The edges of the vision are soft, caressing moods and probabilities. Your last sip tingles kaleidoscopic on the tip of your tongue, tasting like years.
You count the birdsong outside the kitchen window, ensure that all your friends have made it through the night and the finches remember their place in the harmony. You’ve scolded them frequently for dominating the chorus, the alto section rudely imbalanced.
Spreading apricot jam on the sourdough you baked this past Sunday, you count the fruit trees you need to prune when spring flowers again. Some haven’t been planted yet. Some have been growing longer than you.
After breakfast, you go for a walk through your garden and the woods. You count faeries and periwinkles, ladybugs and will-o-the-wisps. You count spiderwebs as promises, birch branches as future besoms. You count the clouds as bestowing shade, and later—rain. You hurry home between premature drops, counting this afternoon as better spent indoors, perhaps in the conservatory, practicing your watercolour safe from the storm.
At lunchtime you count your cats—they come and go, never the same from one day to the next. Today there are three. Margolis fetches the post (a bit soggy); Aster catches beetles along the conservatory walls (useful for long-distance spells); Flint sits in your lap (the most powerful spell of all). You’re warm now, your fingers aching pleasantly from the work of painting.
You doze the afternoon away, counting raindrops in your dreams.
By sunset, the cats have changed. You free yourself from under Charcoal (who seeks nearby shadows and promptly vanishes to do cat things) and return to the main part of the house, lighting lamps as you go. You count matches and flames, hum soothing spells to the mice in the walls. You set about making supper, counting carrots and parsnips and possibilities. You’re liberal with spices, counting flavour as potent magick. So—rosemary, ginger, sage; honey and marjoram; a dash of black sesame, a wedge of bitter tangerine. You inhale, and their scents remind you of glittery banquets, sprawling candelabra, dancing naked in moonlit splendor. You sit at your table and dine alone.
You enjoy reading after supper. First a novel, then a poetry collection. Next, a letter from a lover as far away as a broom can carry. In the evening, you write back, a new cat curled in your lap.
You count solitude a virtue, and value your own company. But you know also that an empty house is teeming with life. A quiet place is loud to those who listen.
You share your bedroom with house spiders, silent tenants stringing their homes between beams. The rafters house brown bats and red squirrels; a family of hedgehogs has moved in under the floorboards. A swallow nest hugs your windowsill. Fireflies dance on the other side all summer long, accompanied by the chirping of peepers. While you dress for bed, you count your shifting family.
This is the best spell. It calms you more than a thousand purrs, or a sea of spices. Nestled under the quilt your great-grandmother sewed by hand, blessings whispered between whip stitches, you utter a benediction to the night.
Let all who share my life, my home
Sleep deep, my darling joys—
While I see you, I know you
When I hear you, I love you
For all your varied magick is part
Of me.
