The Old Witch of Riga, Part II

From the Riga Municipality website:

It is prohibited in the territory of public property:
to engage in fortune telling and magic;

This is first on the list, before the interdictions against open alcohol on the streets or driving a vehicle on the ice of the canals.

I guess the old girl gave them some trouble in the past.

The Old Witch of Riga

A few weeks back, I saw her. Waiting for the tram outside the grocery store. Wrapped in many coats and scarves despite the summer heat, eighty if she was a day, and sporting a genuine hunchback. Furthermore - and what initially caught my eye - she was clutching a pair of gardening shears - a perfect folkloric witch prop.

She looked fully capable of dicing up naughty children and trapping their screaming faces in the old tree behind her cottage, only her cottage got bulldozed by the Soviets, and independence did nothing to restore her to her ancestral home over the ley lines, and the tree got cut down and chopped into firewood that drove the family that burned it mad, and now she has to take the tram into town to shop for gingerbread and prunes.