Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman [57]
Sally, however, is used to hard work, especially in the dead of winter, when she sets her alarm for five a.m. so she can wake up early enough to shovel snow and do at least one load of laundry before she and the girls head out. She considered herself lucky to get the job at the high school so she could have time with her children. Now she sees she was smart. Summers have always belonged to her, and they always will. That’s why she can take her time cutting down the hedges. She can take all day, if need be, but by twilight those lilacs will be gone.
In the far section of the yard only a few stumps will be left behind, so dark and knotty they’ll be good for nothing other than a toad’s home. The air will be so still it will be possible to hear a single mosquito; the last call of the mockingbird will echo, then fade. When night falls, there will be armloads of branches and flowers on the street, all neatly tied with rope, ready for the trash pickup in the morning. The women who are called to the lilacs will arrive to see that the hedges have been chopped to the ground, their glorious flowers nothing but garbage strewn along the gutter and the street. That is the moment when they’ll throw their arms around one another and praise simple things and, at long last, consider themselves to be free.
Two hundred years ago, people believed that a hot and steamy July meant a cold and miserable winter. The shadow of a groundhog was carefully studied as an indicator for bad weather. The skin of an eel was commonly used to prevent rheumatism. Cats were never allowed inside a house, since it was well known that they could suck the breath right out of an infant, killing the poor baby in his cradle. People believed that there were reasons for everything, and that they could divine these reasons easily. If they could not, then something wicked must be at work. Not only was it possible to converse with the devil, but some in their midst actually made bargains with him. Anyone who did was always found out in the end, exposed by his or her own bad fortune or the dreadful luck of those close by.
When a husband and wife were unable to have a child, the husband placed a pearl beneath his wife’s pillow, and if she still failed to conceive, there’d be talk about her, and concern about the true nature of her character. If all the strawberries in every patch were eaten by earwigs, suddenly and overnight, then the old woman down the road, who was cross-eyed and drank until she was as unmovable as a stone, was brought into the town hall for questioning. Even after a woman proved herself innocent of any wrongdoing—if she managed to walk through water and not dissolve into smoke and ashes or if it was discovered that the strawberries in the entire Commonwealth had been affected—that still didn’t mean she’d be welcome in town or that anyone believed she wasn’t guilty of something.
These were the prevailing attitudes when Maria Owens first came to Massachusetts with only a small satchel of belongings, her baby daughter, and a packet of diamonds sewn into the hem of her dress. Maria was young and pretty, but she dressed all in black and didn’t have a husband. In spite of this, she possessed enough money to hire the twelve carpenters who built the house on Magnolia Street, and she was so sure of herself and what she wanted that