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Hey Boss Warlock:

OK, I've seen you: basically, you haven't changed for decades. Clearly, you've discovered the secret of eternal youth.

So 'fess up. Did you find a portrait-painter à la Dorian Grey or something?

Aging in Aiken

Dear Aging:

Clearly, you've forgotten your witchly lore.

Sell your soul to the Horned One, get eternal youth, eternal beauty, erections for hours, etc.

Seriously.

Then there's the Boss Warlock Five-Point Health Plan:

• Keep active, physically and spiritually.
• Keep engaged/interested.
• Spend some time sitting cross-legged on the ground every day.
• Shit squatting.
• Have at least one orgasm every day.

(Nobody wants to hear about discipline, but thou mayest not be a witch without it.)

Then there's the food:

• Eat low on the food chain, mostly plants.
• In general, stick to whole grains and natural sweeteners: honey, maple syrup, etc.
• Eat some beans every day.
• Eat allium—onions and garlic—every day.
• Eat tomatoes (in some incarnation or other) every day.
• Eat raw greens every day.
• Eat cooked greens every day.
• Eat some sort of cruciferous vegetable (= cabbage and kin) every day.
• Eat some sort of orange vegetable every day.

Mostly importantly of all, eat real. By real, I mean close to the source: the closer, the better. Local is better than shipped. Real meat is better than faux, dairy milk than plant, whole grains than refined. You get the picture.

Oh, and top of the list, Aging: get your butt out to the woods stat, give Him a call, and sign that Book like you really mean it.

I was wearing my teasing little red shorts,

you were following me through the woods.

I kind of thought you were after me.

So did she, apparently, but you ended up

with her that night instead. So we didn't.

Decades later, I message you at Samhain,

wishing happy new year. I don't text,

you text back, call. But I don't call,

knowing the overwhelming torrent of words

would drown me. So we don't.

Now, if anywhere, you walk the flowering plains

of the Land of Youth, piping among the apple trees.

I was picking apples one afternoon. I'd worked my way down the row into the oldest part of the orchard when suddenly, for just a moment, I began to wonder if somehow, like some character in a story, I had stumbled out of this world and into Another.

I don't know how much you know about apple trees. They say that originally they came to this world from the Other World. Whatever the truth of that may be, what I can tell you about the apple trees of this world is that they always bear flowers first; then come leaves, and later fruit. There's never a time when they bear all three at once. In this, they are said to be unlike the orchards of the Land of Youth, which in fact do just that. The undying trees of that Land, so they say, bear flower and leaf and fruit at once, all at a time, together. For in that Land, all times are one, with never any winter.

And that's just what I saw in the orchard that day.