Chapter 2: Chapter 2
And then, when you live through another twenty-nine years, Trixie reminded herself, you have to do it all over again. Like me, like Bert. Like both of us together.
Call it a midlife crisis. Croning. Empty Nest. She could call her own second Saturn Return by a dozen different names. But rather than fall too deep into those details, she had to get the party started first. She turned around at her normal juncture in the forest and headed home.
She drafted the invitations for the end of the month. Thanksgiving Weekend, technically, so she hurried and booked the hotel right now, along with the catering, and the other items that she knew she’d need for a proper ceremony. She’d just mailed the invitations, sealing them with her most potent magick, as Bert knocked on her cottage door.
“Hello,” she greeted. “It is lovely to see you.”
“Oh, you knew I was coming.”
“It’s a painting day,” she said, gesturing to his tool box by his side, filled with acrylics that would capture the beauty of the forest. It had been how they met; on one of her walks to gather her thoughts or twigs for her altar, she’d stumbled upon Bert painting the dense lushness of the forest. He was a local artist, famous even, but he was the most down to earth person she’d ever stumbled across in the woods. She half envisioned him as a dryad, half-tree, rather than a man.
But he was a man now, through and through. She knew that first hand. She touched his shoulder as she ushered him inside. “Please, sit down. I think we have a lot to talk about.”
“So you know?” he said, sighing. “Should I bother to get down on one knee?”
“We’re old,” she said. “Our knees hurt.”
“You have tea for it.”
“I do.” She smiled. This was reliving her youth again, wasn’t it? She could feel the Saturn moving in the sky, back to where it needed to be, as she readied herself for this next phase. She was sixty-one. She was going to get married again. And this time, her children were going to be there. All of them together. A party to end all parties, and then a morning after to start over again.
“Well,” Bert said, easing onto one knee. He opened his paint box, took out the ring she’d found earlier, and held it up. “What do you say?”
“Yes.” Trixie said. “It’s time.” 1
As with most important, if not a little dreadful, events in her life, Ivy Fairchild was early. She sat in the driver’s side of her rented car for fifteen minutes at the gas station just outside of Niagara Falls. She took out the invitation from her glove compartment. Though she’d read it at least six dozen times since its arrival at the beginning of the month, she checked it again now. Her mother had requested their presence in fancy script for an official family meeting at six o’clock Sharp in the Huntress Meeting Room at the local Bridal Veil Falls hotel. It was barely 4 o’clock and Bridal Veil Falls was only fifteen minutes away. Ivy tucked the invitation away with a loud sigh. Why had she thought that the drive from her condo in Upstate New York would take over four hours?
“Because it’s Thanksgiving,” she said, channeling her mother’s nasally drawl from her youth. “And people lose all sense of direction when the holidays are around.”
Ivy had to resist the urge to check the moon phase for this weekend, since her mother would have no doubt pulled some arcane lore to make sense of her lack of sense right now. Ivy’s phone once had an app that kept track of all the necessary lunar dates—a fling with a grad student had allowed her to indulge in that sort of magical thinking all over again—but she’d gotten rid of it ages ago. And the girl, too. Kelsey was too immature, anyway. She truly thought that her studying of Virginia Woolf would change something in the real world, when all studying literature really did was give you a fantastic shield to hide behind the real world from, even bigger if you turned all the escapist book reading into a PhD. If only her mother could get the memo now that Ivy was a Doctor of Philosophy. She had a PhD. She was a professional. Sure, her discipline was one of the softer degrees in her fancy school, but she at least wasn’t counting the stars and divining the future anymore.
Ivy’s stomach dropped. She looked at the clock and then the invitation once again in her mind. She still needed to kill two hours and she was already so close. She may as well find a place to eat and stave off her hunger pangs. She’d skipped lunch in favor of getting to her office on campus and grabbing a stack of papers to grade over the long weekend. She remembered the face of one of the janitors, Mort, now as she backed out of the gas station and merged back onto the highway. He was shocked she was there. He didn’t want to be there, but he had to be. Job and capitalism being what it was. But her? No, she had a free choice to spend her weekend however she wished, and instead of watching football or going Black Friday Shopping, she came to the university just to get papers to grade.
Gifts
-- Gift
received Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone