From Jan, unicorn(a)sun-spot.com
Mullein and Wild Cherry. For me, the phrase has come to symbolize a lost
legacy, lost knowledge…and a bit of fear for a future without
Mullein and Wild Cherry. (from the Sunday Afternoon Rocking series)
My 90-year-old aunt bemoaned her bout of bronchitis, wishing for "some of
Mama's cough syrup!" When I inquired what cough syrup she spoke of, I
learned a bit of family history I had not known of before. It seems Mama
had quite a store of herbal medicine, and my aunt declared she had a remedy
for "most anything". The cough syrup was only one of many. The neighbors
would come knocking at her door most any time of the night asking for her
help. This was the first I had ever heard of my grandmother being an "herb
doctor", and I quickly realized that my elderly aunts never thought of
their mother in that manner. It was simply that "Mama knew how to do it",
and no title was applied to the keeper of the remedies.
Mullein and Wild Cherry. Mama knew how to do it…
Excited about this latest revelation, I asked just how it was that "Mama
did it". Alas and alack, the universal malady belonged to my aunts that
seems to affect us all, and we never seem to realize we have succumbed to
it until the hour is far too late to remedy it! They had never paid any
attention to "just how" Mama chose or prepared her home remedies. They did
not know just how Mama had come by the knowledge. The best they could do
was to describe something of the process behind that miraculous cough
syrup. Papa would go out to the woods and gather mullein, they said. He
would strip the bark of a wild cherry. Mama would cook the two things
together on an iron stove and bottle it to put away for the coming
winter. And that was the sum total of the knowledge of "Mama's Remedies"
passed on to her descendants!
Mullein and Wild Cherry. Lost…somewhere in a memory that paid no
attention to remembrance.
We all have a bit of that malady… I would be hard put to survive as my
grandparents did. Without a supermarket down the road, I fear my family
would soon run out of the few jars of canned green beans and homemade
jelly. (And by the way, I made neither. They were given me by members of
the generation before me, who cannot imagine "not putting up" at least some
of one's own food.) Without a modern vehicle, I doubt many of us would
have a clue how to survive in a world of limited transportation. We have
forgotten all about
Mullein and Wild Cherry. Time came folks thought they needed neither. And
that time was first my aunts' time, my father's time, and then my own.
I am a bit of an oddity in my time. I pride myself on my ability to "be a
hermit" with little inclination to dance attendance on the pleasures of the
world around. I cannot remember the last movie I saw, the last ball game I
observed, the last party I attended. I do not like to shop; I dislike
crowds and great gatherings. I tolerate social affairs only when attending
is a necessity. My idea of recreation is camping in a wilderness (albeit
with comforts carted into the wilderness with me), or tramping on a
well-worn path in the same (with hiking boots and canteen). I enjoy the
thought of "retiring so far back in the sticks they have to pump the
sunshine in". I am a bit of an oddity in a modern world, for little it has
to offer (beyond the comforts of it) appeals. Like some of my cousins, I
am a bit of a "throwback" to something that came earlier, to a time I may
in some ways have been more at home in. But fact is…
I know nothing of Mullein and Wild Cherry.
If I can't pick up my eggs in a Styrofoam container, if I can't stand over
the produce counter carefully choosing my "harvest", if I have no
"wheels"
to take me to the same, or to a doctor, or to visit kindred far away….I am
not real sure how I would survive. Could I be given a plot of land and a
few rudimentary tools and survive? Doubtful. Maybe if I had the entire
"Foxfire" series, a Boy Scout troop nearby, many kind neighbors of a
generation before me, the luck of a riverboat gambler…maybe then. Maybe.
Mullein and wild cherry. Memory is not passed along with the genes that
carry the tilt of a chin or the sparkle of an eye. I have "forgotten" what
I never knew.
They survived in the very way I cannot, my grandparents. With no running
water, no electricity, no doctor for miles, no supermarkets, no ready made
clothing. With nothing but soil that could be coaxed if the weather
cooperated, with nothing but the sunshine and the rain, with nothing but
animals kept for practical purposes rather than as pets, with nothing but
rough and primitive tools. "Lord willing and creeks don't rise" was more
than well-used phraseology. It was a way of life. They did fine, near as
I can tell. Their children did not appear to feel inadequate in regard to
their upbringing. "We were all in the same boat," one of my aunts told me,
remembering "down home" on "China Knob". Yes, they did fine, near as
I can
tell. Hard as it was, they kept themselves clean and their place
neat. They called it "having a little pride in yourself". They still found
time to smile and to laugh, to dream and to live. Sure. They did fine.
They had been taught by those who came before, and they knew all about
Mullein and Wild Cherry. For how many generations had the knowledge of
"how" been passed along…only to disappear in the generation before mine?
"We used to laugh when Mr. Tom came to town," an old-timer (who was a
"young whippersnapper" in those days) told me, "Joked that he could plow
all day and still come to town with nary a speck of dirt on his white
shirt!" Pa lived by the sweat of his brow, and worked with the rudest of
tools. He raised what his family ate, and he depended on the cooperation
of the weather and the Providence of his Lord to make that possible. He
never owned a car. He never turned a faucet to produce a stream of
water. He was a grandfather before he had a party line telephone (and then
only at the insistence of his grown children). He was over sixty years old
before he flipped a switch to turn on a light. I am not sure he did not
know that a person might be hard put to do his plowing and hitch up a wagon
to go to town…with "nary a speck of dirt on his white shirt".
Mullein and Wild Cherry. Papa, "Mr. Tom", knew how. I was not
listening. I was not asking. In my world…he saw no need to tell me…or did
he? When I was not listening?
"Oh, your grandma was most particular!", tells another old-timer who knew
the very proper lady I know only from photographs, "Most particular about
everything! Not a hair out of place! Always neat and tidy!" My
grandmother heated water in an iron kettle in the back yard to do her
washing. She made her own soap to do so, she scrubbed with roughened hands
on a washboard, and she made her own lotion to soothe the roughened hands.
She heated irons in the fireplace to smooth the wrinkles from the
cloth. She lived and raised five children in not much more space than my
own double garage.
Mullein and Wild Cherry. Not only does the thought of living as they did
make me very tired, but it is true that I would not know how.
Should all vestiges of living as we know it in today's world suddenly be
wiped away…could I survive? Doubtful…and certainly not in the style my
grandparents did. I am not sure how they managed to do so. I suspect I
would not be "neat and tidy" and I suspect I would not be "most
particular". I suspect I would be hard put to still find time to smile and
laugh and dream. I suspect I would be far more into grasping any semblance
of survival than "having a little pride in myself".
Mullein and Wild Cherry. I don't know how to blend the two to produce the
remedy. In my world there was no need to know. It is important to me now
to know…
How many hundred years had my family known how? For how many hundred years,
for how many generations had the knowledge been passed? For long enough
that a family learned not only to survive with nothing much more than the
resources they found on the land…but also to survive "having a little
pride" besides.
It is lost now…Mullein and Wild Cherry…
And what else was lost with it?
It is important to me now to know…but it is
Mullein and Wild Cherry.
And we forgot to remember.
Copyright ©2002JanPhilpot
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Thanks, jan)
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