My visit to a Witches House by Polycordia

Seriously, it was almost up on chicken's feet.

Louise and I always butt heads at the info shop.  She usually only comes in once a month for the really, really free market, and she brings bags of cotton balls and other odds and ends with her.  She is an old woman from Upper Arlington who always complains about everything.  She acts as if I am her girl there to serve her.  She also claims to have multiple chemical sensitivity, so she is always drawing our attention to chemicals in our immediate environment.  I think this is generally positive, since I think chemicals are pretty bad for everybody, not just people who think they have this disorder. 

Once I acted like I was going to kick her out of the shop because she wouldn't stop complaining.  I came in the shop to open right at 2pm with my arms laden full of food for Food Not Bombs.  I had been up early working with the food and cooking the big meal, and was still carrying things in when she complained that the sign wasn't flipped so people wouldn't know the shop was open. I had been there about two minutes and was still setting up, and she started in grouchily. I told her she would have to stop complaining or she would have to leave, and that she was welcome to try to fix the problem herself, but that she was not allowed to just complain.

That was last month.  This month I tried to be civil, and things went pretty well during my volunteer shift.  It was a struggle this week to get food together for FNB, but we all managed to pot luck it and had enough food for Fred and the other bums, and the activists to eat. Now Fred, the grumpiest bum, and Louise, the hag from UA, started to butt heads and Fred threatened to jack Louise up and rob her. Fred is generally pretty civil and he always thanks me for cooking for him. I think he has been on the street a long time.  But we all have our moments, and no wonder Louise pissed him off.  My general reaction to her is that I would want to punch her in the face when she starts, but I am not a physical person like that and would only resort to verbal argumentation. 

I had to lock Fred out of the shop, and since it was  sort of cold and wet out, he eventually decided to go home to his squat or bando.  Louise always needs a ride home, and complains that we haven't devised some transportation system to pick her crazy ass up from the suburbs. I told her that most of us hardly ever drive, that we ride our bikes. She is so old though, that I think she just has another one of the old ladies from her neighborhood drive her to see us.  I offered to drive her home, since I did have my car and since Fred had threatened to wait for her outside, jack her up, rob her, call the cops on her, follow her home and burn her house down with her in it.  He's done it before, he declared. Oh good lord. I told him we like having him around but that if he did physical violence to anyone at the shop he would not be allowed to come back, and that that would be a real shame because we like having him around. No kidding. Well, he's very old and feeble, has had a rough life and needs a lot of care. So there.  

I drove Louise home, and Marco came with me, probably to help diffuse the situation in case Louise pissed me off and I wanted to fight her.  Louise wanted to tell us all about her plants because we are starting a community garden near the infoshop, the Arawak City Gardens. She showed us her gnarly trees in the front yard, and her garlic bobbles.  We entered her house through the garage, and inside there were piles of plant matter.  We went into her mudroom between the garage and her kitchen and it smelled like... the most lush forest I had ever smelled- like pure nature, outside and unpolluted.  It was a beautiful earthy brown smell, alive and dead and decomposing, growing and bacterial and circular.  

Unsurprisingly, Louise washes and saves all of her trash.  It is organized and sorted into piles.  She is a packrat- her house is filled with junk and debris in every corner. Where there isn't trash, there are growing plants, piles of leaves and grasses, and some of the art she has woven out of found objects.  I told her we should have an art show for her at the SPORE, showcasing her woven pieces.  She has some featuring tarantula skins encased in plastic and framed with woven fibers. Another art piece she showed me was the model of the triple eclipse and the three minor eclipses from the Dark Crystal.  She had a couple of big woven pieces that looked like great wasps nests.  

She got some plant cuttings and seeds for me and Mark.  She acted like some of the seeds she had would be destroyed by the authorities if they were discovered, so she gave them to me.  They were pumpkin seeds, some heirloom variety, but not like pot or a hallucinogen or anything to get you high. Just an odd variety of pumpkin seeds.  Who knows maybe they are somehow magical.   

She led us to the upstairs of her cluttered house to get more plant cuttings. The room we went to had windows on three walls and had been completely re-wilded.  It reminded me of some primitivist anti-civ kids I met one time. Maybe this is what they were talking about.  The room was like a swamp, a mucky forested room.  There were piles of leaves and grasses piled up against the walls.   In the middle of the room she had constructed a pond out of plastic containers, and some water plants she called lilies were rooting there in the water, crawling out onto the carpet.  The three of us chatted for a while.  She was excited to have company, and she told us about the plants she was growing, how some of them were chimeras, meaning they had the cells of two kinds of plants in them but they were not hybrids.  This reminded me of chimeras in mythology, like the Pegasus, mermaids, centaurs, and the griffin. Totally magical and trippy. I think George W. Bush may also have made a public statement against chimeras, which had more to do with cloning and stem cell research.  I joked that his worst nightmare was a push-me pull-you unicorn Pegasus centaur. I often drew this creature on my friends as a marker tattoo.   

As I was crouching down looking at the plants, I glanced down next to me, and sitting in the dirt in the middle of some plants was a big hairy tarantula! I screamed just a bit and we both jumped, me and the tarantula. I was scared for about 5 seconds, until I remembered that the creatures are generally not that aggressive or dangerous, and it didn't seem to be very interested in biting me. So I just looked at it, and yeah, Louise said that she had had a few tarantulas in cages but they all died except for the one that got loose  in her house and it survived because it could follow the air currents of the temperatures that were good for it.  She said that once she found out it was alive in the house, she bought it a mate.   I don't know if the male was still around, but she said if there were babies she would take them to a reptile show, because they also like tarantulas at the reptile show.   

Shortly after seeing the tarantula, it was time to go.  I had had a long day cooking and feeding bums, activists and other wing nuts, and felt about to crash.  Mark helped me make a graceful exit. On the way home I reflected that I probably just hate Louise because we are so much  alike, and maybe one day I will be as crazy as she is and totally rewild my whole entire house.  Even though she is a crazy wing nut, I respect her because she is a free actor who is doing whatever the hell she feels like, and she has the liberty to be different.  I respect Louise in all her craziness much more than people who just let them be oppressed.  She is a squeaky wheel who makes a lot of noise, and some of her complaints earlier in the year actually led to food not bombs being served on Sundays at the infoshop.  I sure can't stand her, but her fighting spirit motivates us in one way or another, and I am sort of glad that she is among the eccentric folks we attract and give home to at the infoshop.