The Bog Witch of Peachtree City
By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale
Somewhere along the way, we cross invisible lines. We don’t notice until we’re past them. We turn around and look with a smidge of nostalgia and a wave of relief. That is over. We made it through. There are serious ones, key relationships or traumatizing seasons, but there are also smaller ones, like when I realized I never, ever again had to squeeze myself into a bounce house with fifteen jumping children body-slamming each other into the sticky, plastic walls. It’s over. I did my time. I never have to stay out at a bar making small talk till after midnight. Or work the tiny ankle holes of skinny jeans over my disproportionately large feet.
There are plenty of things I miss, like the feel of young joints in the morning, singing to my baby without him shoving in his AirPods to drown me out, and being cold. I miss being cold and wearing sweaters so much. But children grow up, menopause arrives, and life goes on. I start looking for new things to fill the day.
My house in Peachtree City, Georgia, backs up to a wetlands inhabited by aggressive deer, copperheads, ticks with diseases, and occasionally an alligator nicknamed “Flat Creek Floyd.” I’ve joked to my husband that when I die, he should chuck my body back there like an old Christmas tree. It’s the perfect swampy setting for my bog witch aspirations.
Scotch is my favorite of all the alcohols, the smokier and peaty-er the better. When imbibing, I like to feel like I’ve just made out with a chimney. I visited Scotland this summer and learned how they make it. Before this, I pictured scotch forming naturally, steeping within layers of peat in a bog. When someone wanted scotch, they’d go to the bog witch who would dip her iron ladle deep within the bog and pull up the peaty-est scotch. She’d share it with you, in exchange for a poem or a dance. Dance for the bog witch, then she fills your canteen, the green one you saved from Girl Scouts back in the ‘80s, and you have delicious scotch to keep you warm and toasty.
I wondered how the bog witch got her job. Was it a tough interview process with lots of applicants? When the old bog witch dies and sinks into the depths below, melting into the peat, her boggy body decomposing to flavor the scotch, all the post-menopausal women in the village line up for the Summoning, where they kneel at the edge of the bog and ask the scotch to find them worthy. One hag is chosen, and the rest become her non-maiden handmaidens. (Her handwitches. Rhymes with sandwiches.) They attend her, braiding long grasses into her gray hair and bringing her herring and bread, apples, and her nightly collagen with probiotics.
I could be a bog witch. I love scotch. I’m post-menopausal. I feel I could serve my village in this way. Unfortunately, my trip to Scotland revealed that scotch is in fact not made in a bog. They bring the peat in. Witches may still be involved, though. They must be, to produce this magical elixir. There are ladles though. I got to participate in a few cask draws, which involved sort of ladle-ish equipment.
Something else very bog witchy, very crone-like occurred on this magical trip to Scotland. I forgot my razor. I could’ve bought a nice new one at any of the fabulous stores we shopped in, but I just sort of didn’t. Up until this trip, I was a daily shaver, but as the days of hiking and scotch-tasting went by, I realized my legs itched less, my shower time cut in half, and my husband didn’t care, or possibly didn’t even notice?
I came home from the trip intending to shave. I didn’t really mean to stop shaving entirely. I mean I’m not opposed to the practice and I’ve spent the last [does math] thirty-five years doing it. Is this another invisible line I crossed without noticing? Every day in the shower I look at my razor and think, eh, maybe tomorrow.
I don’t have a bog behind my house, but I do have a swamp. I could be a swamp witch. Hairy legs are a good first step.
I didn’t really want to sport my new Sasquatch look at the book shop where I work, so I was planning to shave, but then my super fun coworkers provided the perfect solution. When we work at the book shop all day our feet start to throb and swell. So we all bought compression socks. Mine have skeletons all over them and now my hairy hag legs are tucked inside my socks where no one can offer to braid them.
Vascular health is so sexy.
Suddenly I have more time and comfort and—wait was that a cackle? Did I just cackle?
The swamp witch inside of me is growing in power. I’m not sure how much longer I have before she takes over.
My belly looks like I was in a knife fight with all the scar tissue from my surgeries. It’s itchy. Flowy jumpsuits and dresses are my friends, also because of the hot flashes and constant sweating. My skin feels like every pore is pricked with tiny needles. It doesn’t help that I live in Georgia nestled between Satan’s testicles.
Hairy legs, compression socks, flowy dresses, sheen of wet, always hot, damp, and in a slightly grumpy mood. I feel the change coming, a shifting from within. Was that another cackle?
My inner crone arises. She takes no sh*t and doesn’t care about your skincare routine. She RSVPs no, is in her watery swamp bed nestled in the moss by 8 p.m., and wears spectacles. She’s lost the ability to read a book up close but can read a room in one glance and if there’s drama she isn’t having it.
A moth chewed on my favorite dress, creating a hole in the butt, and rather than throwing it away, I wear it every day around the house, the hole fraying around the edges, exposing an ever-widening circle of pale white ass. This dress serves as the base layer of my swamp witch attire, which I will add to as I go, layering throughout the years. Of course all these layers will have pockets where I can stash my scotch.
I’ll walk the neighborhood, offering sage wisdom and scotch samples to the young mothers who attend their spawn. Then when the clock strikes 8 p.m., I’ll slink back to the swamp behind my house, sink into the mud, and cackle.
Melanie Dale is the author of four books, Women Are Scary, It’s Not Fair, Infreakinfertility, and Calm the H*ck Down. She’s a writer for the TV series Creepshow, a monthly contributor for Coffee + Crumbs, and her essays are published in The Magic of Motherhood. She has appeared on Good Morning America and has been featured in articles in Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, The Bump, Working Mother, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Los Angeles Times. To get out of the office, she spent the last few years shambling about as various zombies on The Walking Dead. She and her husband live in the Atlanta area with three kids from three different continents and an anxious Maltipoo named Khaleesi.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.