Folk Wisdom

Today the thought has come to me to set down some of the folk wisdom and animal friend stories that I think of, in my days.

In the early 1900s, my maternal great-grandmother, whom I never knew, used wild plants to heal sick folks. She walked to her patients to give them care. My mother, as a young girl, walked with her. To heal poison ivy, great-grandmother picked "plantain" leaves and cooked those until the water turned color.

When the water has turned color and cooled, a leaf can be used to sop the juice onto the tiny blistered places of the poison ivy. In my home of Terre Haute, Indiana, and playing outside, I used to get poison ivy every once in awhile.

Plantain plants grow everywhere and have a "spike-like" stem with a worm-shaped flower head. We also called those plants "pig's ears").

For colds or sore throats, Great grandma had her patients chew washed peppermint leaves. Peppermint grew in abundance.

AVOIDING A "COLD": Grandmother said, "You won't 'take cold' if, when you lie down for a nap, you cover yourself with something, even a newspaper." Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, told his Boy Scouts, "After sleeping, one's clothes have become slightly damp. To avoid getting a cold, change into dry clothing."

RED SKY: How many of us look at the sky when it's fully colored at dusk and think, "Red sky at night; 'Shepherd's' or 'Sailor's' delight." With a red sky in the morning, we learned, "Shepherds take warning." The forecast: rain lies ahead

WEATHER FORECASTER and GOATS

A west coast radio station's weather forecaster had a window desk. From the window he had a interesting sight. Every day he watched goats brought in to graze on a nearby hill. On days that the goats judged would be clear, the goats climbed the hill and fed on the top. On dark days, with the threat of rain, the goats stayed in the low lands. On iffy days, the goats went part-way up. To entertain himself during his routine work, the man kept track of the goat's predictions and those of his own weather-gauging equipment. At the end of the year, the goats had proved more accurate in their predictions!

WEATHER is of great interest to me.

Two little rhymes follow

When the dew is on the grass, (at night) rain will never come to pass.
When the grass is very dry, look for rain clouds in the sky.

Whether it's cold or whether it's hot,
We shall have weather, whether or not.

ANIMAL WISDOM

SPIDERS : At our Adirondack camp, we noticed that spiders spin a web only on days that they judge will have no rain. On a sunny day, the trail to and from the camp could be spanned by many almost invisible sticky lines. One relative figured out a way around this. With an errand to do, he walked the trail to his car carrying a small twig held out in front of his face. The twig cleared the trail of the "single" sticky webs.

FALL STORAGE One fall I saw a makeshift twig shelf in a tree. On it lay a "deadly" white amanita mushroom, presumably put there to dry. This type of mushroom is poisonous to humans. In a few days the shelf was empty. A day later, a new mushroom had been put into place. I think a chipmunk was drying the "finds" for winter.

SAMMY'S SCENT FILE:
Sammy kept sniffing a new visitor. She said, "Get my scent, Sammy, then put it in your scent file. Then the next time I come, you'll recognize my scent from all of the scents you have on file, and you will know me."

I hadn't thought about Sammy having a file of scents that he uses to identify people by. But when a person come to my door, Sammy knows, whether he knows, the person.

SHORTEN A COLD? Bacteria cannot live in the present of salt and fat. Buttered toast or bread, and also, p-nut butter provides salt and fat. Shorten a cold for you? Sugar, too, is said to be antibacterial. I've also heard that sucking on a hard candy can nip a cold in the bud? Perhaps, preventing the flowering of a sniffle....