Monday, May 24, 2010

Spilled salt


I am not the superstitious type but spilled salt tends to unnerve me. Mostly, I'm just annoyed by the inconvenience of it but somewhere in our collective history, we have absorbed our ancestor's anxiety.
Most folklore about spilled salt tends to lean toward bad luck,inviting evil into your home and all around malevolence.
My Italian family was very superstitious particularly concerning the malocchio or "evil eye". Whether it was wearing a cornetti around your neck(lit. "horns")or giving the hand signal resembling the popular gesture used at Metallica concerts,my Americanized family seemed to easily resist these superstitions in the land 'o plenty.
My preference would be to think as the Brits do, that each spilled grain was said to represent a tear. To acknowledge the shedding of tears seems a perfect metaphor. We all cry and when we do it is an act of spilling our insides,allowing something to run over and it can be quite messy sometimes.But,always a cleansing act of release and renewal.

1 comment:

  1. The book and Dvd about the Blizzard of '77 and Crystal Beach Amusement Park with excerpts are now available at www.whitedeath.com.

    Beware of snowflakes!

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