The kitchen this morning is threatening to swamp under the weight of all this food--the tomatoes primarily, but also the cucumbers, the squashes, the bushel basket of corn: every vessel I have in the household has been pressed into service now for this reason, everything from the large womanly bread making bowls to my delicate and ladylike antique sherbet bowls, the casseroles I never use any other time of year, all filled and manifesting their true purpose.

It is at this moment that I, poised on the edge of putting by all this bounty, begin to catch a glimpse of what I am all about.

I am remembering a movie I saw when I was quite young: the title had the word "Harvest" in it and the film had a barn with a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign painted on. I remember nothing else about it, but it instilled in me then a desire to live in the country and have my own barn to walk around in on chilly November mornings, wrapped in a quilted coat. Today I have the coat, the barn, the land, and understand why, in my memory, there's no ending for that movie. Then I thought that harvest meant completion; now I know that it is another word for transformation, another step in the ongoing alchemy of the world.

If Harvest is a Goddess, then surely her title is She of the Astonishing Lap. Today Goddess of the Cornucopic Body is everywhere in evidence, in the profusion of food that has come in from the garden, of course, but also in her rhymes with the larger world: echoed this morning in the horn of the waning moon as it rose before dawn; present again last night in the curve of the horn on my neighbor's cow, as she lifted her head to study me walking past her field.

Like everything else, the agricultural harvest happens in threes: grain, fruit, and finally fruit of the nut trees. Habondia Herself transformed from Mother of All Things Growing on Earth to a special divinity of the witches. Her own women continued to embrace her even as scarcity consciousness began its stranglehold on the world. In turn, she taught her women to fly. I will gladly claim her, claim havingness, own abundance in my own life, all of these fat seed heads drooping back to the Earth, their little deaths meaning only that they are waiting for this magic, waiting to come again.
• by Anne Markel