catch as catch can

My mother was an herbalist.

But she wouldn't have called herself that anymore than she would have called herself a healer, an economist, a psychic, a homesteader, a seamstress, a psychologist, a therapist, a home economics major or any other title besides mother and grandmother.

When I was a kid, I'd come running in with a plant I didn't know and she'd always know what it was. Sometimes, she'd look at it and ask me where I got it, was there a flower on any of them, did it branch off or was this the main plant, and other questions of that sort. She'd tell me there are plants that have look-alikes. And she'd warn me not to taste anything until I brought it to her. She didn't worry I'd pick up poison ivy or oak, she knew I'd know those.

And we used what we knew. If we got a cut, we didn't run for a medicine cabinet, we picked a leaf --usually plantain. We had the common plantain, with round leaves, not the english narrow leaf. My yard in present time has both kinds, and yellow dock, chickweed and several other things to use in both magical and mundane ways for healing the ills life brings.

I'd love it if Mom were around to share all this with. She didn't make salves or oils or anything like that. She just used what was there while it was there. In the spring, we'd go get the "bitters". She loved greens. As a child, I couldn't gag them down, but now I love them, too.

I've lost some of what she told me when she was alive. But it comes back. And more came with it the year she died.

Mom died in late October 1989. In November, I went walking a long time. This was when we lived over in Nicholas county, in a trailer on a hill above Maria Estates. There were woods and fields and endless wandering. It was a rich time when we were very poor.

I went wandering that November with the waves of grief from having lost my mother. I was 35, but felt about 10, remembering the time when I was about ten and thought of her eventual departure and wondered what I would do if something happened to her. I was wondering that still. I had no one to call. I couldn't ask her again how you made two pats of butter out of one or how you made buttermilk from sweet milk. And what's worse, I couldn't tell her the wonderful things our three daughters were doing now.

I walked those woods and climbed hills and followed deerpaths and then went wandering through farmers fields. At one point, I got tired and I lay down on a hillside and fell into a quick sleep. Then I saw Mom. She was in a garden, surrounded by flowers of all kinds and berries and all manner of things. She was young and old and very pleasant. I woke slowly. It was more like coming to than it was waking.

Come January that next year, I went for a walk, as was my habit, early in the morning. Though it was January, I could see little rosettes of plants that would come later and was noticing that things don't die, they just go dormant, pulling in the spirit, the life-force and conserving their energy between seasons.

I went home and fell asleep and all those little plants came visiting in my dreams. They followed me home. It was the same January when I found Pennyroyal growing up through the snow. But I didn't know what it was and had no one to ask.

We had just gotten out of the whole church habit at that time and it had been a hard habit to break. But, at the library, right around that time, I saw a book called "The Shepherd's Purse" and I thought it might be a spiritual book, so I reached for it.

When I opened it, there was my mystery plant, Pennyroyal. It was a lovely book about herbs. I kept that book and would check it out again and again, and studied these old friends from childhood and learned their names, their proper names, their histories and what all they were used for and how to fix them into salves and teas and preserve them.

I found Yarrow in there and was gleeful, because it had been one that came to me in a dream. I'd been walking, in the dream, with someone beside me. I thought it was my sister, Ginny or maybe my Grandma Hall. I didn't see the other person. But I picked the little fern that grew in my yard -- which was one I did pick and wonder about -- and my companion said, "that's good for a toothache".

I'd later get acquainted with this companion a bit better. It was the same person who came to me in a dream and told me my remedy when I was in Chiron's healing in 2004. "Don't forget your heartsease" is what s/he said at that time. And then, I had to find out what heartsease was and get some and get well.

My adviser/companion is very terse with words. And that puts me in the mind of how Mom was when I was a kid. Just like those plants I'd bring her. She always knew more than she told. She didn't ramble on. She was like my Grandma Hall, her mother, in that way. You could go walking with either of them and never pass on a word the whole time. I remember Grandma Hall saying once, "Child, you do prattle on." Catching a word about old times was rare as gold and I hoarded those words like they were precious metals.

How Mom would teach me things was all in short sentences here and there. I learned to make biscuits when I was 4 years old. First, she'd just let me cut out the ones she made. Then she'd let me add things. She didn't measure, of course, it was a pinch of this and bit of that and "this much" of something else.

I remember setting in the living room, writing letters. I knew how to spell my name, but not much else. My brothers and my sister who were still at home would come from school and I was in awe of them because they could read. I pushed the river every chance I got by asking them things they learned. This one time I remember, I was stringing letters together in hopes of making a word and I'd take the strings in to show Mom. She was busy helping us survive, making something out of nothing, the way she could do. And she'd say, no that's not a word. She said, here, you have to have at least one of these letters in a word, and she wrote the vowels.

I went back and strung some more letters together and stuck in a some of those vowels and took it to her.

"You just wrote the word, 'people'."

I wrote it a dozen times after that. And got out all my beloved little books to see if I could find that word in there.

I think going to school too early puts kids at a disadvantage. I think people eat more when they're hungry. By the time I started first grade, I was ready to hit the ground running.

But my want-to came partly from the fact that when my people told you something, you had to listen fast and catch it going by. When it came to information, it was catch as catch can. Even the house wights and nature spirits tried to keep information and me apart (but that's a story for another day).

When it comes to learning and to life, "stay hungry" is great advice.