Even today, high school can be hard for the gender-nonconforming. In those days, it felt nearly impossible.

At the time, we lived on the southern shores of Lake Erie. The woods along the bluffs overlooking the Lake became my frith-stead, my refuge. When life grew too much to bear, I would go down to the woods and stash my shoes under a fallen log. Then, in the dark, I would walk the deer-paths. Losing myself, becoming one with the woods, for a while the sorrows would lift.

(When I say that I was raised in the woods by white-tailed deer, I really mean it.)

Some nights I would climb down the cliffs and build a fire on the beach. Then I’d swim out as far as I could. I’d dry off at the fire, dress, and head back home, heart—for a time, at least—lightened.

Finally, though, I could take no more. After supper one night I went down to the woods, fully intending never to come back.

In Erie, there’s always a wind off the Lake, but that night the wind was still.

Because of this, the woods were full of fireflies. By their light, barefoot, I walked the deer-paths.

(Bare feet will always find a path in the dark.)

That’s when I met the Stag That Walks on Two Legs.

By the time that I got home that night, everything had changed.

That’s how the woods, the lake, and the Horned saved my life.

That’s why you’re reading this today.

Bare feet will always find a path in the dark.

Deep and Deeper

Take a look at any random collection of historic Leaf Mask images. What you will find is many Green Men, but few (if any) Green Women.

Why not?

If words like “sexism” and “patriarchy” are coming into your head right now, don’t let them distract you.

The answer is simpler and more basic than that.

Green Pubes

It was one of those Winters that seemed like it was never going to end.

Just at the point—here in the frozen North it happens pretty much every year—that I was beginning to feel that Winter was permanent and Spring a mere figment of my frost-bitten imagination—I had a dream so impacting that I’ll never forget it.

In the dream, I’m gazing down contemplatively over the expanse of my own naked body. In place of pubic hair, a crisp little thicket of glossy green leaves grows directly from my skin.

Hair : animals :: leaves : plants.

Dionysiaca

The Leaf Mask motif first emerges in art in the Mediterranean world at the beginning of the first millennium, growing out of the common Dionysiac image of a reveler crowned with vine-leaves.

At a traveling exhibit of items from Pompeii (destroyed 79 CE) that came through the Twin Cities some years ago, I saw a painting which struck me as a kind of proto-Green Man: a male head wearing a vine-leaf crown, in which the hair and the leaves of the crown merged visually in such a way that you couldn’t tell which was which.

Becoming one with the vine: it doesn’t get more bacchic than that.

Clintonism

The plant-animal hybrid that is the Green Man motif articulates a kind of primal fantasy: what would it be like to be a plant?

In the earliest Green Men—before, that is, the pathological imagination of the Middle Ages began to envision them as exhaling (or disgorging) greenery—hair translates into vegetation.

That’s why Green Men, historically speaking, outnumber Green Women hands-down.

Beards and mustaches being typically male attributes, our question comes down to a simple matter of added visual interest.

As Bill Clinton, in his usual supercilious way, would have put it: It’s the facial hair, stupid.

What does a witch like her want with the body of an executed criminal?

Don’t ask me, I’m just the go-for guy. You want it, I’ll get it for you: for the right price, anyway. Me, I don’t know anything about magic, and—believe me—you don’t want to, either.

Call it plausible deniability.

(I hear she cooks ‘em down into a topnotch flying ointment, but maybe that’s just a story.)

Anyway, her silver’s as good as anybody’s. Twenty years now I’ve been sourcing for her, and in all that time, she’s never had one single complaint, and never once stiffed me. Good business, that.

Good money too, if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.

Well, son, time to learn the family trade. Beats honest work any day of the moon, ha ha.

Just leave the cart there, then come on over and help me move this stone, would you?

Oh, and bring the sack too, while you’re at it.

Can’t go hauling a dead body through the streets of Jerusalem still wrapped in its grave-clothes now, can you?

In the normal way of things, I’m not a gun guy. I don’t own a gun; truth to tell, I’ve never even fired one. (Yes, I’m just another pansy-ass South Minneapolis liberal wussie. You got a problem with that?) In general, I don’t think of guns as things of beauty.

That’s why the Green Man Gun—no matter how many times I see it at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts—invariably takes me by surprise.

The Green Man Gun is indeed a thing of beauty. No, I can’t tell you what kind of gun it is. (A wheel-lock pistol?) No, I can’t tell you where it was originally from. (One of the Germanies?) No, I can’t even tell you how old it is. (“16^th” century, maybe?)

Here’s what I can tell you. It must have been made for a wealthy nobleman, because it wasn’t just made to shoot: it was made to be beautiful.

The Green Man Gun is inlaid with mother-of-pearl and colored enamel, set into the sides of the wooden stock. (“Lock, stock, and barrel” we say, meaning the gun in its entirety. “Stock,” of course, originally meant “tree trunk”: here, the vegetative component of an otherwise metal object.) The major decorative motif, of course, is swirling vegetation with a Leaf Face peering through: hence the name.

What does it mean to have the God of Vegetation adorning, of all things, a gun: a god of life on an instrument of death?

Well, we can ask this question, but—let us acknowledge—it’s a modern question. The Green Man only became a god in the so-called 20^th century. To the nobleman for whom this gun was made, I suspect that the Leaf Mask represented decoration, no more.

As modern pagans, though, our reading of the past is not limited to how the past read itself. This is a central principle of contemporary pagan hermeneutics. The New Pagan Thought is non-Originalist by definition.

(Take that, foul SCOTUS conservatives.)

So let me pose the question once again: why a god of life on an instrument of death?

Here we encounter one of the new paganisms’ central concepts: the fruitful Death, the death that gives life. The wheat dies on the scythe to give us bread. The grape is plucked and crushed to give us wine. The gun fires to protect, or to feed. The Green God is no mere god of life. Like his twin the Horned, he is a sacrificial god.

Welcome to the pagan world. Here opposites meet, kiss, and resolve. Here, death brings life, and guns bear Green Men.

Whenever you fire this gun, the Green looks back at you.

Kill beautifully, he says.

My boyfriend that summer was also named Steve, so naturally we became “the Steves” to everyone that knew us.

(As if being gay wasn’t already hard enough. Ah, the things straight people never have to put up with.)

That was a Rocky Horror summer. At his favorite consignment shop, Steve had found a wedding gown and veil that he couldn’t wait to wear in public, so I rented a tux and we got ready to run down the aisle during the Midnight Showing. We even handed out rice in the lobby before the doors opened.

It so happened that a local news outlet was there that night, doing a local-interest piece on the Rocky Horror phenomenon. Of course they wanted to film the happy couple running hand-in-hand down the aisle amid cascades of rice. For that they needed our permission.

“Are you out to your parents?” Steve asked, sidelong. Having your family find out that you’re gay via the local news is probably not the best way to go about it.

“Not yet,” I said, grimacing. “Are you?”

He shook his head.

Our eyes met.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

So we did, two scrawny-ass gayboys in love.

Steve made a beautiful bride. Next morning, I was still getting rice out of my hair.

Among the many by-names of the Horned, God of Witches, Morning Star is one of the more mysterious.

Here at Temple of the Moon, the following prayer is offered twice daily, evening and morning.

(Ideally, there would be, not two but four offerings a day, as it was in the old days: at Sunset, Midnight, Sunrise, and Midday. [By “midnight” and “midday” I mean, of course, solar midnight and solar midday. We who have been here since the days of the painted caves and before, what is clock time to us?] Alas: an unpaid priesthood serving out of love, in these unloving times, we do the best that we can.)

I love the prayer’s intimacy and its gender-bending imagery. His is the Mystery of Maleness, yes, yet Maleness does not encompass his Mystery.

Reader, I invite you to its use. As you recite it, O lover of the Horned, face him and so touch the designated points of your own body.

Thus do witches pray.

I drink, Morning Star, from your left breast;

I drink, Morning Star, from your right;

I drink, Morning Star, from your phallus.

Your phallus, your right, and your left breasts,

Morning Star, giving me suck.

© 1996 Steven W. Posch

Seriously? Stormtroopers? At Paganicon?

I’m hanging out in the Druid hospitality suite when the masked and armed trio shoulder in through the doorway, scanning the crowd.

Thank Goddess for the Received Tradition: forewarned is forearmed. I step forward.

“These are not the Druids you’re looking for,” I tell the leader in his white Darth Vader mask.

He turns to his comperes.

“These are not the Druids we’re looking for,” he tells them. “Let’s keep searching.”

They turn and go. Behind me, the room erupts in laughter and applause.

Good old Paganicon. I’ve been wanting to use that line for years.

In Sweden, the witch is a symbol of Easter.

I kid you not. Swedish Easter cards feature pictures of witches flying off to the sabbat. Kids—these days it’s mostly little girls—dressed as witches (with babushkas and painted-on rosy cheeks) trick-or-treat from door-to-door, collecting their goodies in, not sacks, but coffee-pots.

It’s an interesting chapter in the long, twisted story of relations between the Old Ways and the New. Pull up a stump.

In Swedish witch-lore, Good Friday is the biggest sabbat of the year because, of course, God is dead and the powers of evil reign supreme. So keep those brooms, pitchforks, and billy goats locked up, or some old crone may nab one for her evening jaunt to the big shindig at the Blåkulla, the “Blue Mountain.” Keep a fire burning on the hearth and the windows shut tight, or the mirk-riders may steal your aquavit, cheese, and coffee (!) for their celebration.

Why coffee, you ask? Come on, everybody knows that witches love coffee, strong as the Devil and black as sin. (That much, at least, is true.) I suppose it helps keep us awake until cockcrow for the wild revels.

In fact, hilltop bonfires once burnt throughout Scandinavia and the Germanies on Good Friday. In some places—I saw several some years back in Bavaria—they still do. Why bonfires on Good Friday? Keeps the witches away, of course.

Or so they say. Call it protective coloration: hiding in plain sight.

So, Christ is dead, eh? Yeah, and the war’s over in Troy, too.

Hey, pass me the coffee, would you?

“Everything they say we are, we are.”

Sparky T. Rabbit

For a contemporary look at the Easter Witch, strongly influenced by Carlo Ginzburg’s studies on the Benandanti, see Swedish novelist Majgull Axelsson’s striking and controversial April Witch (Aprilhäxan) (1997), tr. Linda Schenck, Random House.

It’s the first theological argument that I can remember getting into.

Which is better, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny?

For most of the other kids, the answer to this question was a no-brainer—stuff, they liked all the stuff—but I can remember holding out for the minority position.

Both figures, of course, represent a kind of kids’ autonomy. For both, you’re up early, before anyone else, and in control.

Santa just brings you clothes and socks and stuff that you don’t want anyway, went my argument.

(In rather poignant hindsight, I can rephrase this as: Santa brings you things that you would want if you were who they thought you were, or rather, if you were who they wanted you to be. Thus, Santa and his gifts paradoxically embody a kind of existential rejection.)

The Bunny, on the other hand, brings you bad stuff.

Really: on what other day of the year do you get to gorge on candy before breakfast?

On top of which, he makes you work to get it.

(In retrospect, I can see here also the stirrings of early pagan instinct: Santa : culture :: Easter Bunny : nature.)*

Sorry, folks: more than 50 years on, I stick with my original position.

The Bunny is way better.

Spring is the Season of the Trickster. This paradoxical figure turns up in culture after culture: the lovable screw-up who teaches by the power of negative example. Maybe Spring is his season because it’s so inherently surprising. I mean: dead is dead, right? And then, suddenly, counter to expectation, things come back to life.

I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that the major trickster-figure among Algonquin-speaking peoples—who inhabited a broad central swath of North America—is Hare. Stories of Old Man Coyote come from South and West, but here in the Middle, it’s Hare—or Jackrabbit, as we know him around here—that does the job.

(Cowans may not be able to tell the difference between a rabbit and a hare, but pagans know better.)

Though tales of the Ostara Hare come from another continent originally, there’s an imagistic synchronization here that one can’t help but savor. Add in Brother (“Brer”) Rabbit—originally a West African trickster—and one really begins to wonder.

Almost, it seems intentional.

Happy Season of the Trickster. It’s been a long, hard Winter, but now it’s Spring.

Let’s go gorge on sugar.

*My friend and colleague Ro “Granny” Nicburn (reborn to the people)—herself solidly pro-Bunny—suggests yet another permutation: that Santa, with his “naughty or nice” morality, can’t—at thirteenth and last—help but come across as judgmental, whereas the Bunny’s delicious amorality appeals to those of us weary of feeling judged.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that an early preference for the Bunny may be an indicator of incipient pagandom, but systematic research on the topic is admittedly still in its—so to speak—infancy.

“Hey, some of my best friends are non-pagans.”

The line dependably gets a laugh, but—for me, at least—it’s been a long time since it was true. These days, I’m so far in the Broomstick Ghetto that virtually all my friends are pagans.

I can’t think of anywhere else that I’d rather live.

“Freedom” has largely come to mean “having no obligations”, but for the ancestors it meant almost the direct opposite.

Kin to friend, Freyja, and frith (peace), free ultimately derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *prî: “love, beloved, belonging to the loved ones.” As my friend and colleague Hildiwulf Wordsmith has pointed out to me, historically speaking, you’re free, not when you’re on your own, but when you’re among those that you love.

Until you’ve found your people, you’ll never be free.

I spent the weekend among my people at Paganicon 2026.

Whenever I found an elder, I would ask the same question: In these dark times, how do we move forward together into an uncertain future? For a wonder, they all answered with one voice.

The future has always been uncertain. How do we move forward together? We work the microcosm: we work within our own community. We build; we strengthen the social bonds that will see us together into the future. That, in the end, is what will get us through.

That, in the end, is what has always got us through.

For better or for worse, long ago I made my decision.

Welcome to life in the Broomstick Ghetto.

Call me the freest of men.

Why are some people witches and some not?

Easily told.

We’re witches because He sires us Himself.

At the moment of our begetting, the Horned overshadows our fathers.

Like that obnoxious kid in the book, witches have two daddies.

A woman once asked her mother if she could remember anything about the circumstances of her conception.

“Oh, for gods’ sakes,” said her mother. “Of all the…how could I possibly…?”

Then she paused. When she spoke again, it was in an undertone, as if to herself.

“…So that explains it!”

Helga Hedgewalker, God with Torcs

“Hey lad, what’s your plaid?”

That’s what I’d call out whenever I saw another guy wearing a tartan kilt at Paganicon 2026. The kilt being the Pagan Male National Dress, this happened not infrequently.

Here’s what invariably came next. The guy would stop—they always stopped—and tell me a story: which clan’s plaid it was, whether or not he had any hereditary right to it (about 50/50), and either something about his ancestors, or how he came to be wearing that particular plaid.

(Me? That’s Ioan of Cymru: Jones of Wales to you non-Cymraeg-speakers. It’s a striking tartan—I found myself getting lots of compliments during the course of the weekend—and the fact that, like other Welsh tartans, it was thought up in 2003 by some enterprising entrepreneur, bothers me not bit one. One in every ten Brits being a Jones, it’s maybe no great brag—maybe we’re just a really large family—but that doesn’t dint me either.)

Here’s the truly interesting thing: for the rest of the con, whenever one of those Men in Kilts approached, I would find myself seeing the plaid first, not the guy. For a man-for-men like me, that’s highly unusual. I suppose, after all, that’s what plaids are for: long-range, long-term identification.

Fortunately, there were no more than one of any given tartan at Paganicon this year. Hey, I may be gay, but I’m still a male of the species.

More than one of the same, and we’re talking territorial claim.

Morrison. Robert. Charmed, I’m sure. Yes, Lord Summerisle, fancy you knowing that. Ah yes, the Guardian article: not a very flattering photo, I’m afraid. Although back on island they call me “Summerisle” tout court. Apparently John Donne was wrong about the whole “no man is an island” business.

Oh, no politics, please. I find that the only way to survive psychologically as an MP is to maintain a strict wall of separation between business and pleasure, if you’ll pardon the Americanism. What happens in the House of Lords, stays in the House of Lords, we always joke.

Yes, thank you. Finest fruit in the EU, I quite agree. Have you tried the new American Honeycrisp, by any chance? A fine apple, if I may say. Approaching Summerisle quality, though not there quite yet. Although of course I’m afraid total objectivity in these matters rather escapes me, as you’ll understand.

Ah, thanks for asking. Promises to be a bumper year, thankfully. Fancy you remembering that. Yes, a whole run of bad harvests, back in the late 60s and early 70s it was. Nearly ruined us economically. Everything turned around in ‘73, though, and they’ve just been getting better every year since then. We actually out-produce Somerset these days, did you know that?

Yes, I believe that was ‘73 also: sorry business, that. Sergeant...Howard wasn’t it? Something of the sort. Set out from the mainland, never did make it to the island. No, no body ever found, although some of the wreckage from the plane did wash up afterward. Engine failure at sea, apparently. Terribly sad, that.

Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to be off: the proverbial boat to catch, you know. Literally, in this case. Ah, the joys of island life.

No, no, the pleasure was mine. Cheers.

Let me tell you the tale of a mighty magic worked by the pagans of Minneapolis in the winter of ‘25.

No, not that magic: the civil resistance and massive street protests that, in the end, sparked the end of the Tr*mp years. Those came later. The magic of which I speak was both smaller, and larger.

Pagans, you see, are just as bad as everyone else.

For us, Yule begins the day after Thanksgiving and ends on the day of the Solstice. Parties, feasting, rituals. By the time that we get to the actual Thirteen Days of Yule, there’s nothing left to do because we’ve already done it and, frankly, have become just a wee bit tired of it all.

After grinding my teeth over this for years, I finally resolved to do something about the problem.

(This is known as applying Frowa’s Rule, named for the high priestess whose response to whining was invariably: “And what are you doing about it?”)

So I decreed an Open House for the Fourth-Fifth Days of Yule here at Witch Central: arguably the Most Pagan House in the Most Pagan Neighborhood of America’s Most Pagan City. (Fourth-Fifth because the religious day begins at Sundown.) As it happened, everyone had the day off; family obligations were there none.

The hearth was kindled, the candles were lit. The doors were thrown open. The house filled up with pagans.

Then we did as the ancestors did.

We talked. We toasted. We laughed. We feasted. We sang about the Wild Hunt, and the New Sun. We told stories. We cooed over the newest coven baby.

There may even have been dancing.

Where’s the magic in that, you’re asking?

See, then, and I’ll tell.

Hours later, getting ready for bed that night, I turned on the radio to listen to the news, and suddenly thought: Oh, yes: it was Christmas today.

That’s what we did with our magic, here at Witch Central, in the Most Pagan Neighborhood of America’s Most Pagan City: we cast a circle and created a CFZ, a Christmas-Free Zone. On what is arguably the most non-Pagan day of the year, we had made for ourselves, instead, a time and a place for our people and for our holiday.

As we will, so mote it be.

This is the tale of a mighty magic worked by the pagans of South Minneapolis in the Winter of ‘25: in the greater Scheme of Things, one might think, a very small magic indeed.

Oh, but don’t be fooled.

It’s the last morning of the annual tribal gathering known as Paganicon. Still time for plenty of good conversation.

“How’s your day been so far?” I ask my friend, spending time with whom has been one of the great pleasures of my weekend.

“A little too exciting,” he says, holding up his tribal ID on its lanyard around his neck. He’s been commuting to the convention, and there’s no admission without one. “When I got here, I realized that I’d left this at home, and had to go all the way back to get it.”

“You should have called me,” I say, holding up mine. I’ve been staying at the hotel. “We’d have found a way to get one to you.”

“Yeah, right, like I’m going to pass for one of the most recognizable local pagans,” he says.

“Funny, he doesn’t look gay,” I deadpan, miming the gate-ward’s putative surprise at seeing him with my ID.

He grins.

“Actually, I’m a little disappointed you think I don’t look gay,” says my friend, who isn’t. One of the things that I love most about pagan guys—besides the kilts, of course—is that we’re not afraid to be affectionate with one another.

“You say the sweetest things,” I say.

If I believed in reincarnation, I’d say that it’s probably a Long Memory.

Since I don’t, I can only say that I don’t know.

She’s old, and something is wrong, badly wrong. That’s why the old country woman has come to the city, and is standing here nervously in the crowded street, looking up to the high temple, golden in the morning sunlight, that crowns the top of the hill. She has come to see the Lady, because she needs a favor, and she needs it badly. On her hip she bears her gift: you don’t come empty-handed to the Lady, especially when you need a favor. It’s a poor woman’s offering, a basket of eggs, but she has lovingly painted each one with the brightest colors she can find, to make them beautiful for the goddess.

That’s it: as it were, a snapshot from the past. No before, no after. It’s a memory, or rather an image, that I’ve had in my head since early childhood at least, one still frame from a vanished movie.

Read more

These days, in English, we have just one word for peace. The ancestors, though, saw it differently.

1400 years ago, the Anglo-Saxon-speaking Hwicce, the original (and eponymous) Tribe of Witches knew of two kinds of peace: frith and grith.

(Frith—kin to free, friend, and Freyja—ultimately derives from the ancient Indo-European root meaning, apparently, “love of one’s own.” The origin of grith remains unclear.)

Frith I’ll define as peace within a community. Grith, however, is peace between communities.

It’s a useful distinction. One can, after all, have one without the other.

What does it say that we ditched our old peace vocabulary in favor of a foreign import? “Peace” comes from Norman French and, ultimately, Latin. It’s a Red Crest peace, an imposed peace, a top-down peace-from-without. As always, the Abrahamics talk a good peace—pax, shalom, salaam—but, throughout history (as current events all too plainly demonstrate) their deeds have invariably given their words the lie.

Frith and grith, though, are organic: peace-from-within, peace-between. While peace is defined, in essence, by an absence—of hostilities—frith and grith are a matter, rather, of proactive relationship: relationship within and relationship between.

Peace is something that you make. Frith and grith, rather, are something that you weave. Blessed, indeed, are the frith-weavers.

A woven peace: opposing forces, warp and weft together, together making something whole and new.

Frith, grith: not one kind of peace, but peace in different modalities.

Time to set up the loom, folks.

Time to set up the loom, and weave ourselves some peace.

My friend and I are watching the most recent iteration of Bridgerton, a fantasy romance series set in a matriarchal, early 19th-century London that never was.

(In my initial review on my old PaganSquare blog, I likened Bridgerton to a blown-out Ostara egg: a pretty but empty shell. Four seasons on, the metaphor still stands.)

“Ugh,” I say. “The only thing that could possibly be as bad as rule by men, would be rule by women.”

My friend catches my joshing tone. She laughs.

“Estrogen poisoning on a societal scale. ‘Everyone’s a winner’,” she rejoinders, then adds: “Maybe rule by the non-binary?”

“Gods help us,” I say. “‘Everyone’s a they.’ Prison terms for use of the wrong pronoun.”

“Demerits,” she corrects.

I faux-shudder.

We’re playing, but it’s hard not to hear the truth of what we’re saying, too. Lots of American men are feeling culturally disenfranchised these days. That’s why they vote for Tr*mp.

That’s why we need a culture of inclusion, where everyone has a say.

Call it checks and balances.

Jeez, block’s really parked up tonight.

Yeah, it’s the Witches.

Witches?

Yeah, first day of Spring today. One of their big shindigs, first day of Spring.

It is?

Yeah, it’s like this every year, first day of Spring. That’s what they do, I guess: make the seasons change, and stuff.

Sure wish they’d got around to it sooner, then. Been a bitch of a Winter.

Tell me about it. Swear I just about wore out the snow shovel this year.

You and me both. Witches, hunh? Who’d a thunk.

Yeah. Well, see ya round. Hey, happy Spring.

Yeah, you too. Sure wish they’d go back to brooms.

“Do you know what our all-time most popular pysanka is?”

I’m talking with Luba Perchyshyn, owner and co-founder of that longtime Minneapolis landmark, the Ukrainian Gift Shop. Not one to sit by with idle hands, she’s working on an egg as we speak; I can smell the melted beeswax in the kistka as she works. Over the years, she’s made—and sold—tens of thousands of pysanky. Her hands are deft and quick; the kistka makes little scritching noises as she draws the tip over the surface of the egg. She doesn’t seem to have any problem at all carrying on a conversation while simultaneously constructing a complex three-dimensional design. Gods.

“What?” I ask, curiosity piqued.

She turns the egg to me. Written in blackened beeswax across the shell, two stags with branching antlers face one another, heraldic-wise, across a tree that in some ways resembles a giant flower.

“We’ve not only sold more of these than any other design, we’ve sold way more of these than any other design, for years now,” she says.

“Really?” I say, intrigued. What the Christian significance of the pattern—if any—may be, I don’t know. Twin Stags, and the Tree of Life? As a pagan, it seems clear enough to me what’s going on here. “Why, do you think?” I ask.

“I have no idea,” she says. “People sure do like it, though.”

She pauses, kistka motionless in mid-air.

“What is it about trees and deer?” she says, shaking her head.