In The Belly Of The Beast - Part Three

We could have turned tail and ran away, but two things prevented us. If Mrs. Price really was a witch, she could have turned us all to stone or something. Then again, if we ran, she would have told our mothers what we were up to, and our mothers would have told our fathers, so we were stuck - we had to follow Mrs. Price.
Was she taking us to where she and John-John performed all of their secret rituals?
What was she going to show us, and how did she know we thought she was a witch?
As we walked along I noticed that the woods here behind Mrs. Price's house were a lot "neater" than the woods behind our house. There wasn't a lot of sticks and limbs lying on the ground. There wasn't a lot of leaves on the ground either. We were walking on a well-kept path, and so far I hadn't seen any animal heads.
When we reached a small clearing Mrs. Price stopped us and began to talk to us about stuff like mulch and compost, and taking care of trees and stuff. She told us how she and her son took all of the leaves and grass clippings and made fertilizer out of it. There were big mounds of dark soil and leaves and things, and Mrs. Price told us how plants needed organic food to grow better. We didn't know what the heck she was talking about, but she proceeded to lecture us about how to care for trees and how to clean up the woods.
She showed us a grove of bamboo growing in her woods. I was amazed at that. I thought bamboo only grew in the jungles in the South Pacific, like in all of the war movies I had seen on TV.
Then Mrs. Price showed us where she had buried some of her pets. It was a small, well-kept cemetery for a few cats and a dog.
The whole time Mrs. Price lectured us, John-John hovered around in the distance, never saying a word.
After what seemed like hours, Mrs. Price dismissed us with the promise that we would never trespass on her property again, and if we did want to walk in her woods, to please knock on her door and ask.
We scurried out of there, relieved that Mrs. Price hadn't turned us all to stone or called our parents.
I realized that Mark Gerber had pulled a fast one on me, and that he probably knew what was going on in Mrs. Price's yard all along. I'll bet you he even told her we all thought she was a witch. Yeah, I was the perfect sucker.
Mrs. Price was just an old school teacher living with her weird son, practicing some kind of all natural gardening or something.
It was kind of a let-down really. No witches' cauldron or strange altars, or secret rituals with magic spells, and no skull-lined forest floor. Nothing supernatural at all.
Just a weird old lady with peculiar habits who lived with her adult son who may or may not be "all there", and a gloomy-looking house in need of some paint and maybe some brighter light bulbs.
No Mrs. Price was not a witch after all.
But she sure was spooky.