My intuition is strong this week, I suppose. At least, it was while I was at the farm….
I’m barefoot in waist-high grass so thick I can’t see the ground. I can barely walk in it, let alone run. It’s like swimming through mud. It’s as thick in one direction as the other so I decide to keep walking and hope for higher ground on the far side of the old pond that was once encircled by oaks before lightning and the widening of the pond took most of them. I edge closer to the pond where the grass isn’t as heavy. I pause for this telephoto picture of the sunset sparkling off the other end of the pond where the meteorite-type rock was found when the pond was dug in the late ’60’s by a highway crew needing dirt. Then…
Rite of Awakening — Southern Gothic with bite, Book One of the Rites of Passage. Available direct from the author → Or read it free in my online Library.
For some weird reason, I get an image in my head from the Bible. It’s Samson, scooping honey from a lion’s carcass. I get this incredibly uneasy feeling. I actually look around in the grass for a carcass…maybe a deer or coyote. I start to feel as if I can’t breathe and my antennae are on full alert, telling me to leave. Not to go back the way I came but “AWAY” from where I’ve been. It’s through taller grass and the ground is damper and less solid but I’m to leave, now, and take that particular path. I do, and the feeling subsides as I walk Southeast toward the creek.
My brother arrives for lunch the next day and I’m talking about the wheat, the grass, the thistles, the creek, the pond. That’s when he says, “Yeah, Mama did tell you to be careful of the bee hive in the tree down there, didn’t she?”
Er, no….? Ooops!
I’d been quite close to it. Never saw or heard them, and with my zoom lens, I’d had to stay farther back to get the shots I wanted unlike my last visit a month ago when it had been chilly weather.
I hadn’t thought of Samson and the riddle of the bees and the lion in years, but that sudden image and the feeling that went with it was enough to tell me that something was wrong.
A Southern witch returns home. Secrets won’t stay buried. A chance to confront and heal—or face the consequences.
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