The Persistent Wisdom of 'Practical Magic'

I am not much of a Halloween person in that I don’t go crazy with the decorations or plan a costume out for months in advance, mostly because I’m never invited to any parties where I would wear a costume. The neighborhood I live in hasn’t had a very active trick-or-treating scene for a few years now (last year we left a bucket out with a “please take one” sign and some clever hooligan stole the whole thing), but when I was a kid it was wild. You couldn’t drive down the cul-de-sac streets for all the hoards of children. My brother—seven years older than me—was tasked with taking me and my friends from house to house, and when we were done he and I would pour our candy out on the living room rug and trade. He loved KitKats and Snickers, I loved Skittles and Starburst. We carved pumpkins and then our mom would roast the seeds in spices and herbs and we’d take those to school with our candy as snacks.

As an adult, Halloween is a vibe I try to cultivate throughout the year. There’s nothing I can say about autumn and my love for it that hasn’t already been said, but suffice it to say that I feel most comfortable when there’s a slight chill in the air; when it gets dark early and the trees look like paintings and there’s talk of witches and magic. Halloween is just part of that. It’s a night when the veil between our mundane reality and the ineffable whatever else is paper thin, and it is that situation that I want to live in permanently.

Enter Practical Magic.

I first discovered the sister witch movie based on Alice Hoffman’s novel when I was a young twenty-something living alone in a converted barn a few minutes down the road from the house I grew up in. I spent nearly 6 six years in that barn, and those were the loneliest years of my lonely life. I had no direction, no ambitions or goals, and no vocabulary to articulate how that lack made me feel. In other words, I was young.

What I know now that I didn’t know then is that I don’t want a “career,” or a “path” or a “direction,” and it was the feeling strange for not wanting those things that made me feel lonely. I have ambitions, yes, but those ambitions have nothing to do with climbing ladders or rites of passage or doing basically anything anyone tells me to do. I’d prefer my life to look a lot like that of the Aunts in Practical Magic: I want to live in a big house full of beautiful things and dress in funny outfits and have tea parties and scare the townspeople. Okay, I’m being facetious, but you get it. I want to construct a life around feelings and stories and delight, not around ambitions and money and traditional norms. This of course is a privilege that many people cannot enjoy, so I choose to make the most of the fact that I can.

Some part of me saw the Aunts’ life in Practical Magic and recognized it as home, even though I wasn’t there yet. It’s the Aunts who take in the orphaned Sally and Gillian Owens, who tell them when they are at their most vulnerable, “In this house, we have chocolate cake for breakfast, and never bother with silly little things like brushing our teeth.” When you were a kid, did you ever dream of more? It’s a place where childhood never ends, essentially, and the life I’m making for myself now resembles childhood more than adulthood (except I never brushed my teeth when I was a kid and that resulted in many cavities, so now I have to).

It is also the Aunts—Aunt Jet specifically—who reassured me, “There’s a little witch in all of us.” Misfit girls who grow up to be misfit women find comfort in witch stories not for the magic, but for the triumph of the strange over the normal. The women in these stories are different from their peers, but they end up better for it. When I was alone in that barn, feeling so lonely and so different, I couldn’t see the way to the being better for it part. It’s so simple, “There’s a little witch in all of us,” but it matters because it put me in my place and reminded me that my perceived difference had nothing to do with other people, only with my assumptions of them. “Better for it” doesn’t mean “better than,” it just means feeling better about myself. They probably felt strange too, and in ways that I could never fathom. There’s a little witch in all of us, after all.

Then there’s the classic line, delivered by Sally Owens:

“There are some things I know for certain: always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder, keep rosemary by your garden gate, plant lavender for luck, and fall in love whenever you can.”

This is the practicality in Practical Magic, the everyday wisdom that I craved when I was living alone in the barn for how it gives a life not a direction necessarily, but a shape. Firstly, it’s the admission that these are the things she knows for certain because there is so little that one can actually know for certain, which makes these simple notions just as important as serious matters like God or the meaning of life. Then it’s the acknowledgment of forces outside of oneself: throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder keeps the evil at bay, rosemary is kept by the garden gate to ward off unwanted visitors, lavender is planted for luck because luck has so much to do with it, and then of course, love. “Fall in love whenever you can” isn’t about falling in love with people, it’s just about falling in love. I was so focused on loving people who didn’t love me back when I lived in the barn, and it never got me anywhere. Now I’m focused on loving a house, a desk, a dog. I fall in love when I watch the robins eating the berries that drop from the tree and into the yard. I fall in love with the first sip of coffee, with the sound of the sugar cube plunking in. It’s love for love’s sake, not for any one person or action. Love like this is like Halloween: it’s a vibe I try to cultivate throughout the year.

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