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I let an astrologer read my chart blind. I took notes.

Theo (saturn_returns) offered to read my chart knowing nothing but my birth date, time and place. Being who I am, I recorded it and scored every claim afterward: hit, miss, or too vague to count. Results: a lot of vague. A couple of clear misses (I am not 'secretly theatrical'). A handful of hits I'd expect from anyone who has met an engineer. And one I can't shake. He said my Moon in the 4th house suggests I show love by fixing things for family. Last winter I spent forty hours restoring my farmor's broken mantel clock. I've never mentioned that here. It doesn't prove anything. One data point is an anecdote. But I went home and wound the clock, and it felt like more than maintenance.

Psalm 37 for my nephew

My sister's boy starts his electrician apprenticeship Monday, and she called and asked me to put a light up for him. First thing she's asked me for since Mama's house. So tonight I dressed a white candle with a little olive oil, set it in a saucer of sand on the kitchen table, and read Psalm 37 over it. 'Fret not thyself.' He frets. He gets that from me. Grandmama taught me you don't pray at the Lord like you're ordering at a drive-through. You pray alongside the work. That boy finished his course at the tech college, passed the aptitude test on the second go, and has his new boots lined up by the door already. My job is the rest of it. Candle's burning down now. I don't leave the room while it's lit, never have. Front porch swept, Florida Water on my hands, and a full heart.

Pappa's day, by our calendar

Our calendar has no leap years, so Pappa's anniversary creeps a little earlier through the English calendar every few years. This year it fell yesterday. The proper ceremonies were done for him by a priest at the Zoroastrian Centre in London, and I watched on my phone propped against the bread bin, scarf over my hair. At home I did what I know. Fresh oil in the divo (steel thali, nowhere near the curtains, as ever), a jar of white tuberoses, a cup of tea made the way he took it, far too sweet, and the Ashem Vohu and Yatha Ahu Vairyo for him, slowly, the way he taught me when I was six and fidgeting. He used to say prayers aren't for asking. They're for keeping the line open. So I kept the line open for an hour. Then I drank his tea, because he would have been offended if I'd poured it away.

Sleeping in the god's house, Melbourne edition

In the ancient world, people travelled to the sanctuaries of Asklepios, at Epidaurus, at Kos, purified themselves, made an offering, and slept in a special hall hoping the god would come to them in a dream. It's called enkoimesis, incubation. I am not at Epidaurus. I am in a one-bedroom flat in Brunswick with a sheepskin rug from IKEA. But I wanted to try a small, honest version. I wasn't asking about my body. That's what my GP is for, and Asklepios, son of Apollo the healer, would agree. I was asking about my brother. We haven't properly spoken in almost two years, over something stupid that grew into something big. So: a bath, clean clothes, a honey cake on the shrine and a short hymn read aloud (badly). The lamp was only lit for the prayer and blown out before bed. Then I slept on the rug beside the shrine, which my back has opinions about. I dreamt of a dog. A big, scruffy, yellow dog, very calm, who walked me down to a harbour that looked like Piraeus and sat beside me on the steps. That was all. We just sat. Dogs were kept at Epidaurus and were part of the god's sanctuary life. I knew that, but I didn't think of it until I was writing the dream down this morning. What I felt wasn't advice. It was the feeling of not needing to fix everything before sitting down beside someone. I texted my brother at lunch. Just an old holiday photo of that harbour and 'remember this?' He replied with three laughing faces and a photo of his own dog. It's a start.

Taught my granddaughter Lily to read tea leaves Sunday afternoon. Loose black tea with a pinch of dried chamomile from the garden, wide white cups, no strainer. Drink it down to a spoonful, swirl three times toward you with your left hand, turn it over onto the saucer, count to seven. Her cup had a very clear bird near the rim, which in my mother's book means news on its way, and soon. Mine had what I generously called a lantern and Lily called 'a trash can.' An hour later her best friend phoned to say she's moving back from Ohio. Lily now considers me a professional. I am not correcting her.

Chai, the way my mother argued about it

Every family in India has a chai recipe and every family is wrong except yours. Here is mine, which is my mother's, which she defended against my father for forty-one years. For two cups: one cup water, one cup milk. Bring the water up with a thumb of ginger, crushed (not grated, she was very firm), four green cardamom pods cracked open, a small piece of cinnamon, two cloves and three black peppercorns. Add two spoons of strong Assam and a few tulsi leaves from the pot on the windowsill. Pour in the milk and let it rise three times, pulling it off the heat each time before it boils over. Sugar to taste, then strain. The first small cup goes to the little Krishna on my puja shelf. He has never once complained about the ginger. My father, on the other hand...

Uncle Roosevelt's dream book

Uncle Roosevelt kept an old dream book on the kitchen table, the kind folks used to buy at the drugstore, cover held on with tape. Back in the day plenty of people used those to play the numbers. Uncle never did. He said the Lord and Aunt Ruby both frowned on it, and he wasn't sure which one scared him more. He just liked reading what the old folks thought dreams meant. Last week I dreamed about fish. A whole washtub of catfish sitting on my porch. Now, any Southern grandmother will tell you what dreaming of fish means. Sunday after church my niece pulled me aside on the steps. Baby due in May. Didn't even need the book.

In our house, dreams are mail

Hollywood taught a lot of people that anything involving Vodou and dreams must be frightening. In my family it's the opposite. Dreams are mail. Grann would ask us at breakfast, 'Who visited?' the way other grandmothers ask whether you slept well. Last week I dreamt of her lakou in Jacmel: the yard swept so clean you could see the broom lines, the mango tree, her voice calling my name from the kitchen in the tone that meant food was ready and I was late. I told my manbo, because that's what you do. What she said back stays between us. But I wanted to share the swept yard and the mango tree, because that's what Vodou looks like most days. Family, memory, and somebody calling you in to eat.

A jar of calm for the driving test

Eli, my grandson, takes his driving test Thursday and he's been a wreck. So yesterday we made a little calm jar together at the kitchen table: dried chamomile from the garden, a pinch of rosemary for clear thinking, a few grains of rice so nothing gets "stuck," and a folded note in his own handwriting. He chose the words himself: "Steady hands, eyes up, no curbs." He laughed at me the entire time, then quietly put the jar in his backpack. I'll take it. The real magic was twenty minutes with a sixteen-year-old who put his phone down. Practical note: the parallel parking still needs work. Spells meet you halfway.

Two ravens at the offering stump

First Sunday of every month I pour a horn of mead and leave a heel of bread at the back of the property, where the forge yard meets the trees. It's for the landvættir, the spirits who were here long before my mortgage. Usually it all just soaks into the moss. This time two ravens came down to the stump before I'd even turned around. Took the bread, ignored the mead entirely, looked straight at me and made that deep knocking sound ravens make. Critics. My daughter (8) watched from the porch and announced, 'They're Huginn and Muninn and they're reporting back.' I'm not going to be the one to argue. Next month the bread gets a little honey.

My father's tesbih

Baba is ill in Istanbul, the slow kind of ill that makes a son on another continent feel useless. Last night we were on a video call and he was too tired to talk, so he said, 'Then let's just do dhikr.' So we did. Him in his chair by the window in Kadıköy, me at my kitchen table in Chicago, each with a tesbih of thirty-three beads. La ilaha illallah, over and over, his voice a little behind mine because of the delay. We said nothing else for twenty minutes. I have never felt closer to him. Please keep him in your prayers, whatever shape your prayers take.

Dime in the shoe, psalm on the porch

Our niece Tanya drove up to Atlanta for nursing school this week, her first time living away from home. Before she left I sent her off the way my uncle sent me: an old silver Mercury dime in her left shoe, the 91st Psalm read over her on the front porch, and a little red flannel bag in the glovebox with salt, a bay leaf and a picture of her grandmama. She asked if the dime actually does anything. I told her it reminds her she's got people praying behind her. That's what it does. She texted me last night: "Made it. Shoe's uncomfortable." Good. Means she's still wearing it.

Last Sunday my eight-year-old watched me pour mead on the offering stump and asked, very reasonably, why we give good mead to nobody. I told her it isn't nobody. It's the land-wights, the ancestors, the gods, depending on the day. But mostly I told her about gifts. The Hávamál says a gift always looks for a gift in return. Our whole way is built on that: you give, they give, you give again, and over the years it becomes a friendship. She thought about it, then poured a little of her apple juice next to the mead. 'In case the small ones don't like alcohol.' Fifteen years I've been doing this and it never once occurred to me to offer the small ones juice. We do now.

Inventory of my crystal collection

Three river rocks my nephew gave me, one amethyst point, a chunk of something the label called 'aura quartz' that I now have questions about, and a blue glass marble. The marble is staying. It has seniority.

Sweetening things with my sister

My sister and I haven't been right since Mama's house was sold. Too many words at the closing table. We're talking again, but stiff, like two people who learned each other out of a book. So I set a honey jar. I told her I was doing it and she laughed and said "go on then, do your thing," which is the most she's said to me in weeks. Our two names on brown paper, written crosswise, folded toward me, pressed down into a small jar of honey with a cinnamon stick and a few dried rose petals. I read Psalm 133 over it: "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is..." Every Sunday I burn a little white chime candle on the lid, set in my cast-iron skillet on the stove where I can watch it till it's done. Three Sundays in. Yesterday she called to ask for Mama's cornbread recipe. Slow is how honey works.

My grandmother's lakou, rebuilt on the fourth floor

Growing up, summers meant my grandmother's lakou outside Jacmel. A lakou is a family compound, a yard shared by generations: houses around the edge, a big tree in the middle, and the spirits of the family woven into all of it. My grann knew which corner the old ones liked, which tree you didn't lean on, which songs went with which work. She passed when I was twenty-two, and I thought the lakou died with her. My mother sold the land. I was in Brooklyn, in a fourth-floor walk-up with radiators that clank like a drum line. It took me years to understand the lakou was never only the land. It's the people, the remembering, the feeding of each other. Now, every few weeks, my aunties climb those four flights with foil trays of diri ak djon djon and pikliz strong enough to wake the dead (respectfully). My cousin's kids run up and down the hallway. Somebody starts a song my grann used to sing at the washbasin and we all join in, off key. There's a small table by the window with her photo, a glass of water, and a white candle in a hurricane glass, up where little hands can't reach. With Fèt Gede coming at the start of November, I've been thinking about her more. The Gede are lwa of the dead, and they love a good laugh. So did she. When the aunties are loud and the pikliz is too spicy and somebody is crying from laughing, I feel her in the room. The lakou survived. It just moved up four flights.

Three tosses of the moon blocks

Took my mother to the temple on Saturday to ask whether she should sell the old house. She doesn't trust anything that isn't jiaobei: two red wooden crescents, flat on one side and round on the other. You kneel, give the deity your name, your address and your question, then let them fall. One flat and one round side up is yes. Both round is no. Both flat means the gods are laughing, usually because you asked badly. First toss: laughing. My mother had asked 'should I sell the house,' when the real question was 'is it all right to let go of your father's garden.' She asked again, properly this time. Yes. Yes. Yes. Three in a row. She cried a little, then insisted on buying sesame balls on the way home. That's how you know it went well.

Nine steps, three hundred dolls, one patient husband

Navratri started last night, which means our living room is no longer a living room. It is a golu. For anyone who didn't grow up with it: in many Tamil homes we build a set of steps (always an odd number, we do nine) and cover them with dolls. Gods and goddesses on the top step, then saints, then people going about their lives, then animals and little village scenes at the bottom. The idea, as my paati explained it, is the whole of creation climbing toward the Divine Mother, one step at a time. My marapachi dolls, the carved wooden bride and groom, came from my grandmother's house in Mylapore in a suitcase, wrapped in my old school uniform. They go up first, every year, before anything else. This year my husband built new steps out of shelving because the old cardboard ones finally gave up. He measured three times. I love him. Every evening for nine nights we light the lamp, I recite the Lalitha Sahasranama (slowly, the 7pm version, not the heroic 5am version), and whoever visits goes home with sundal and a little bag of betel leaf, kumkum and a bangle. Our Canadian neighbours come every year now, and their daughter has formally requested a cricket player doll for the bottom step. She has been told the cricket player must sit next to the cows. If you keep a golu, post your steps. I want to see everyone's dolls.

Three knots for the wind

There's an old story along this coast that sea witches used to sell sailors a cord with three knots in it. Untie the first for a gentle breeze, the second for a stiff wind, and the third... well. You never untie the third. That one's a gale. My nephew Kit has been learning to sail all summer at the club in Penzance, and on Saturday he's doing his first proper trip across the bay. So I made him a cord. Three strands of natural hemp, plaited on the harbour wall at low tide with the gulls supervising. I tied a knot at each of three breaths of the wind: one when it was barely lifting the flags, one when it gusted, and the last when a squall came through and soaked me right to the bone. Into each knot I spoke what I wanted for him: patience, good judgement, and the sense to turn back. He's sixteen. He rolled his eyes. He also asked if he was allowed to keep it on the boat, which in my experience is how teenagers say thank you. The part I didn't tell him: the third knot isn't really a gale. It's the one you leave tied so you always remember you've more in you than you're using. Mine has hung on the hook by my door for twenty years. Never once undone. Tide's at 3:40 on Saturday. I'll be up on the headland with a flask, watching for a small white sail.

Reading the cards like my uncle did

Folks ask why I don't use tarot. Simple: my uncle Roosevelt read a plain deck of playing cards at his kitchen table, so I do too. Hearts for love and family, diamonds for money, clubs for work and worry, spades for the hard things. He'd shuffle, have you cut three times toward yourself, then lay nine cards in a square and talk to you the way a good mechanic talks about your car. Gentle, but no nonsense. Read for a young lady from church this week (she asked; I don't go offering). Nine of hearts dead center, the wish card. Ace of spades down in the corner. I told her what my uncle would have: the wish is real, the hard thing is real, and you're going to have to walk through the one to get the other. She said it was the first reading that didn't just tell her what she wanted to hear. Uncle Roosevelt would have been pleased.