What Was Actually Happening
It took me growing up, and a fair bit of digging, to understand that what I watched happen on that shelf was not a game and not a craft project. It was sympathetic magic — the same logic that sits behind a poppet or a witch bottle, and yes, right alongside what most people only know as the voodoo doll. The apple was never just an apple. In her hands it stood in for a person, or a trouble, or a piece of ill will aimed at our house. What happened to the apple was meant to happen to the thing it stood for.
Carve the face. Let time and drought do the rest. As the fruit shrank, dried, and darkened, whatever she had named — an enemy, a sickness, a bad intention circling too close — was believed to shrink right along with it. By the time the apple was gone, so was the threat. She never raised her voice over it. She never made it a performance. It sat on a shelf in a kitchen and did its work quietly, the same way she did everything.
The Rhymes We Never Wrote Down
Because this was passed hand to hand and never page to page, the words that went with the knife were spoken, not stored. They were built to match the rhythm of the peeling — steady, unhurried, the same cadence every time. Depending on what she was working toward, she would have reached for one of a few traditional shapes. I share them here not as a script to follow, but as a record, so the sound of it is not lost along with her.
Banishing Trouble or Illness
Flesh of fruit and face of clay,
take this trouble far away.
As you wither, shrink, and dry,
let the harm pass softly by.
Wrinkle up and shrink away,
lose your power day by day.
What was fresh is old and small,
leave no trouble here at all.
Household Protection
Face of apple, eye of seed,
watch the door in time of need.
Catch the bad and hold it fast,
till the changing moon has passed.
The Pippin Game
Pippin, pippin, on the tree,
bring my true love unto me.
Let me carve the face I will see.
Three purposes, three shapes of the same small ritual: send something away, keep something out, or find something out. My grandmother's apples were always the first kind. She was not playing at love games with the fruit — she was keeping the house clear.
What I Understand Now
I do not think she ever sat me down and called it folk magic. I do not think she needed to. She peeled an apple, she said a thing under her breath I was not meant to fully catch, and she let the shelf and the slow air of the kitchen do the rest. It was ordinary to her the way tending a garden is ordinary. It only looks like magic from the outside. From the inside, it was just how you took care of your people.
A grandmother's plain words.
A child who did not know
she was being taught to watch.