I was born just 22 days after the Spring Equinox, giving me a healthy dose of that playful Springtime energy. I’m full of the kind of frolic and folly that you would expect from a child of the blooming Spring. I like fairies, pixies, and glitz and glamour. Some days, I am but a child in the meadow.

Shoot. My daddy called me princess up until the day he died.

…but like the Dark Half of the Year, that’s only half the story.

Let me explain. The blooming Spring I was born in. Well, it forgot to bloom.

On my due date (April 3, 1987), a rare Springtime blizzard hit the small town that I grew up in. That Blizzard was called the ‘Great Spring Snowstorm’. For three days, snow fell steadily across Southern West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. You might not know this, but snow falling that long and slow can be deadly.

Especially when it’s unexpected.

Especially for people living in remote mountain regions who are cut off from resources and left to fend for themselves.

That’s why my people were inclined to maintain a healthy balance of fear and respect for great mother winter, and the gifts of destruction and renewal she brought with her.

We knew all too well that the Cailleach can be one hell of a high vengeful biscuit eater…and because of her blessings at my birth, so can I.

A Testament to My Mother

But the moral of this story isn’t that. In fact, this story isn’t even mine. I’m a long shot away from being the hero or main character of this story.

No, this story is a testament to my mother and all the women of stone and fire from which I was molded.

It’s important to note that I wasn’t born on April 3rd. In fact, I waited 8 full days to make my way into this world.

I try to imagine what it must have been like for my mother. Here she was, just 22 years old, pregnant with her second child and 45 minutes over mountainous terrain from the nearest hospital. Heck, the only thing she had to get her there when it was time for my birth was a broken-down car.

I imagine my mom, watching the snow fall—day after day—foot after foot—blanketing everything around her with danger. It had to feel like an endless anticipation of hows and what ifs.

She seemed to have handled it all pretty well, though. Labor started in the early morning of April 11th, but she waited 7 hours to tell anyone. Finally, she told my dad it was time, and everyone went to work asking neighbors and family for help getting her to the hospital.

Even after all that, she refused to get into the car and go to the hospital until she had one final bath. You see, personal hygiene is far more important to Hillbillies than popular media would have you believe.

To make a long story short, we made it to the hospital just fine and after a few more hours of pain and waiting, I made myself into this world.

Strength and Determination

As I tell this story, I stand in full appreciation of the grit and gristle that lives so deeply in the bones of the women who birthed me. That strength and rock-hard determination to make it through any storm is the reason I’m alive to tell this story today.

At Imbolc, we celebrate the flickering flame of Brighid’s hearth. But so often, we forget to thank the Cailleach for carrying it through the harsh winter storms in the first place. We are thankful for the strength and lessons that come from our ancestors, but we forget to honor the pain they went through to birth them.

My mom and her kin were not the only ones to benefit from the strength of survival. No, everyone reading this story today can harness that gift and use it to survive the things that were designed to destroy us.

Short Granny’s Legacy

To understand this, you don’t have to look any further than my Short Granny. She was my grandmother on my father’s side and she was a spitfire! She lived at the head of the holler with the Wizard house at the mouth and I used to ride my bike up there to see her. It wasn’t very far—maybe a quarter of a mile—but I swear her land felt like a different world.

She had a weeping willow at the mouth of her driveway that felt like a passageway into the land of the fae. It was a magical place, built by a magical woman.

But my Short Granny was no fair fae. That old bird was tough!

I could never understand why everyone was so scared of her. She was 4’9″ and weighed maybe 90 lbs. She had white hair, pale skin, and a constant set of bruises all over her body. By the time I was 5, she was already bent to match that great Willow’s limbs. I don’t know if it was the osteoporosis or the orneriness that made her that way, but she was bent and twisted all the same.

When I close my eyes and think of the Cailleach, she is what I see. I know that land she built, she built it with her bare hands. She did it alone and she did not do it softly. Maybe that was what was needed at the time, but I wonder what would have been different if she had lived through one less dark winter night. OR if she had learned that she didn’t have to carry that flame through the darkness alone in the first place.

I haven’t had much ancestral contact with her for most of my life, but she came forth during a Samhain ritual a few years back. I think I’m starting to understand why.

I think she’s here to remind me (and all of you) that you can make it through the winter storm and be all the stronger for it, but you better make sure that you tend the flame along the way. You don’t want to end up being an ornery old twisted woman at the end of a holler, after all.

Oh, and when life gives you biscuits…make gravy.

Hope and Renewal

It wasn’t all darkness, though. There’s a hope that comes from seeing the light return…in knowing that it happens year after year, without fail. If strength is like breaking a bone, then hope is the mend.

The next story talks about just that. I call that story Wizards, Warmth, and the Awen.