The Thanksgiving Invitation

Prologue

PrologueIt was time.

Beatrix—Trixie—Fairchild rose from her cottage bed this morning with a renewed sense of conviction. After lighting candles and adjusting the adornments on her altar, she wandered into the local woods which thatched her single house.

It had rained the night before. Not uncommon for early November in the Niagara Falls region, but it was the heavy kind of rain that made the trees bend down, stripped them of their leaves, and then left them naked and covered in fog come morning. It was also Trixie’s favorite kind of morning. After Samhain, when the spirits had all been put to rest again for another year, here she was, still alive.

Still alive, but also still alone.

Well, that’s not entirely true now, is it? she reminded herself as she walked through the woods. Her ceremonial red robes were hidden under the hiking jacket that Rowan had gotten for her one Christmas just before Rowan had moved to Canada more permanently. Not just for school anymore, Mom, Rowan had said. But for the rest of my life, I think. I want to stay here.

If it’s your home, then I approve, she had said.

I think so, yes.

You think? Trixie asked. Or do you know? There is a difference. A big one. A—

I know I can live there.

Rowan’s freckled face had been marked by additional seriousness, additional knowing. And so, Trixie had given her blessing. Rowan left for Canada, while the oldest child of the Fairchild clan Ivy had stayed in the state of New York, but cloaked herself in her ivory tower of knowledge. The last time Trixie had seen Ivy, her stunning red-headed firstborn had been a spitting image of Trixie in her youth, only with more frown lines on her mouth. Ivy had just received her Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature, having defended on the Winter Solstice. Her work had been on poetry, too, so it was sort of like spell-craft. So much like me in your age, Trixie had said when Ivy had shown up for the holidays, still tired and hung over from her celebrations the night before. And my mother before me, and my—

I’m the first to get a post-secondary education in this family, Ivy corrected her. I’m different.

Yes, special. Always so special. Your birth chart told me.

Ivy had not answered, and the subject was eventually dropped as soon as it had begun, but the silence was more than enough confirmation to that exact birth chart. Ivy was a Virgo rising, the perfectionist sign, hiding overtop of a moody Cancer sun sign and an even moodier Pisces moon. Her first born was still devoted to the family line, following in step with all the other women who came before her, even if she wasn’t a witch in the same way, and even if she didn’t seem to want to talk about it at all with her mother.

Then there’s Hazel, Trixie remembered now as she went passed a struggling hazel tree that bore her second child’s name. She hadn’t seen her middle child in years, not since she’d joined that band and gone off on the road to become a superstar somewhere in the US. It was hard to know how far away her daughter was, but some mornings, Trixie would awake and feel Hazel deep in her hands and bones. They were in the same type of supermarket, touching the same fruit, walking in the same way but in another part of the country. They were in the same type of bed, folding the same sheets, only one was in a seedy motel and the other was in a cottage. And when Trixie had first met Bert, the man who affirmed to Trixie that she was not alone at all anymore, she was sure that Hazel, too, had found someone or something that was also making her smile in the same way. My child who is not my child anymore, she thought. She nodded. None of her children were her children anymore. That was why, right now, it was time to gather them once again.

Trixie looked at the fading full moon in the early morning sky. The clouds were parting, the dawn was being ushered in, and she had a lot of planning to do if she wanted to host a family reunion this upcoming Thanksgiving. She’d found the ring that Bert had in his sock drawer when she was putting away his items. She knew it was time for of them to move onto their next chapter as well as it was time for her children to do the same. She looked at the sky, looked passed the stars and moon which regulated her everyday working life, and saw straight toward Saturn in her mind’s eye.

Saturn, in astrology, was the planet associated with conformity, social order, maturity, and rulers—in other words, it was the planet of adulthood and its consequences. Each twenty-nine years, the large planet moved back to where it had once been in the sky when the child was born. The Saturn Return. When this occurs, each child must then reach the next phase in their own lives, where they wrestle with the roles they have currently chosen for themselves and if that is truly what they want. Over the next three years, they must make changes in order to fully prosper as adults.

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.”