EVERY NEIGHBORHOOD HAS ONE!
Every neighborhood has one resident whom all of the children believe to be an evil witch. In one neighborhood I lived in, I was that frightening creature. It isn't that I really did anything to cultivate that idea; it was just that I lived alone and I wore long dresses and I had purple streaks in my hair. I was a disc jockey and my radio persona was The Purple-Haired Pagan. Of course, the neighborhood children didn't know that because my show was on in the wee-hours of the morning: a time when children would be in bed and certainly not listening to the radio.

I was always amused by the children because I can remember what it was like being a child. I would hear them outside my house daring each other to go up and touch my porch. Once in a while, one of the braver children would actually run up to the edge of my porch, touch it lightly and start running away from my house. All of the other children would join him or her, screaming at the top of their lungs as they ran down the street.

When the children saw me outside my house or sitting on my porch, they would get very quiet. All eyes would be upon me with anticipation. I believe if I had ever said "boo" I would have caused multiple heart attacks and/or strokes. Sometimes, when they were outside daring each other to touch "the witch lady's porch", I would open my curtain slightly to look out at them. They would all run screaming down the street: "The witch lady! The witch lady!"

Sometimes I could overhear the children's conversations about me. Once after we had had several days of snow, the snow in my yard melted faster than anybody else's in the neighborhood. I heard a little girl tell her friend that I could make snow melt because I was a witch. Once, a little boy was intent on making an impression on a little girl he was with. He told her that he had been in my yard many times to get his baseballs when they were hit into my yard. "I'm not afraid of the Witch Lady!" he proclaimed. He did not prove his claim to the little girl by walking into my yard, though.

The children could see through my window that I had many houseplants. I heard them once discussing my "witch weeds" that I supposedly grew to make "witch poisons" from. They could see my cat sitting in the window, and they swore it was a black cat that helped me cast spells on little children. (My cat was black and orange, but the children saw a black cat, in their little kid's view.) Why, they said it roamed the neighborhood after dark and if some little kid left their window open, it would tear right through the screens and turn into a panther and carry the kid off to the Witch Lady! Those children knew a kid that it had happened to!

One thing that caused great concern to the neighborhood children were the toad houses in the yard. They had been placed there by a previous tenant and toads had actually taken up residence in them. I saw no need to disturb the toads, so I simply left them there for the toads to use however they pleased. The children were convinced that the creatures were little children that I had turned into toads. The bathouses that had also been placed by a previous tenant were where I kept the grownups I had turned into bats, according to the children.

On Halloween, very few children came to my house to trick-or-treat. The few brave ones were very impressed, though, because I always passed out little bags of half a dozen individually wrapped penny candies tied with orange and black curling ribbon. The day after Halloween, I always had lots of candy left.

All in all, it wasn't too bad being the neighborhood Witch Lady. I was amused by the children. Their parents knew I was harmless, so I never had any problems from them. It was an interesting time in my life.

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