Today I pick the card, The Spindle of Loss. It has snakes, two of them wrapped around the spindle, their heads arched, tongues extended, poised for a victim.

My mother once made dresses from polka dot cotton, summer dresses, one for six-year-old me, one for her. She moved the fabric along under the needle of the singing machine as it stepped its way stitch by stitch along the seams. Bigger, smaller, we matched perfectly.

She was Bridget and six years later she died in February, the month of Bridget or in the Celtic calendar, Imbolc, one of the four points of transition in the year.

The saint named Bridget was also a goddess and she too had special powers with cloth. When she gained the promise of land for her monastery from her bishop, he told her it would be just enough to match the area of her cloak. But Bridget had powers to draw on that were more than a match for the bishop. She agreed, we can imagine how that pleased him, then trusted her powers that she would be given what was needed. The legend tells us that her cloak extended to cover a great area of Co. Kildare.

In a similar way, those dresses of polka dot cotton that made us a matching pair for that summer under the apple trees have extended themselves in time and memory and those spitting snakes will gain no power of poison over them.

---

.

Margaret O’Brien formerly lectured in English and Creative Writing at Waterford Institute of Technology (now SETU). Her book, Weather Report: a 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale was published in 2022. Her poetry and prose has been published in a range of publications in Ireland, UK, US and Australia. Margaret is an affiliate of Amherst Writers & Artists and is a founding editor of the international literary magazine, Trasna. She started the annual Brewery Lane Writers’ W/E in 2013 and continues to run the monthly open mic, Poetry Plus, in Brewery Lane Theatre, Carrick-on-Suir.  Margaret has also co-produced numerous cross-disciplinary arts projects in conjunction with The Tudor Artisan Hub arts collective. She is currently writing a hybrid novel based on a true family story from the 1890s. Margaret can be found at www.margaretaobrien.com and https://margaretobrien.substack.com/

.