She told me the plant, a variety of aloe, was from Lithuania and was an offspring of a plant that her mother and before that..... her grandmother had used in making "medicine".
The aloe plant has babies in the summer, small tender shoots that sprout from the bottom of the plant, which she transferred each fall into a pot to root them so the historic plant line would continue.
She used the aloe in many of her home-made medicines. She cut it open and smeared it on burns and bites. She advised sucking on split stems for stomach and intestinal problems and finally....she would cut it up in small chunks and toss it into a potion of whiskey and honey which cured or fixed everything else which ailed you.
My grandmother always told me I came from a long line of village midwives and healers and she wanted me to cherish the plant and its offspring and continue to make medicine even if I was headed off to some strange city called Omaha to study in a university.
I kept the plant on my dorm window and even made the medicine a few times in college although I suspected most of my friends thought the medicine was just a nifty excuse to drink whiskey.
I doubted the Lithuanian origin of the aloe because I know my grandmother came over in the Eastern European immigration wave of the 1916's and I couldn't imagine her bringing over a pot of cactus through Ellis Island.
She mentioned she carried it in a rag but history classes taught me her voyage by land, sea, and then train to Chicago would require over a month of traveling and a plant in rag would either rot or dry up.
I still have the plant she gave me and propagated three more pots. She always had 4 pots of the cactus...three on her window sill and one pot on the porch as a safeguard in case something happened to the other plants. They are ugly and wild and each year I trim them down .....because they get woody ....and so big they sometimes crack the clay pots.
Last summer, I pruned them as usual in July and .....as usual...... forgot about them the rest of the summer.
In September, I was raking leaves in a dark spot off of the driveway when I noticed something green in the middle of the leaf pile. I separated the leaves and gasped. One of the fragments of the aloe which I tossed away two months ago had grown small roots and was green and thriving in the middle of a dead pile of leaves.
I remember standing up and feeling my neurons snap.
Good god, she could have carried the plant over from the old country. If the plant could survive, untended in a dark pile of leaves....wasn't it possible it could survive a dark voyage of a month or so in a moist rag kept with her belongings? or in her purse? I was shocked....the family legend could be true.
I immediately went online and discovered cactus and aloe plants were common in parts of Lithuania and were often used in traditional healing remedies. I looked at the scraggly pots of cactus and realized my great great grandmother could have used the offshoots in some remote village.
Today I was working in the yard....and took two babies from an old plant and put them in a new pot. The babies are from the plant my grandmother gave me over 25 years ago when I headed off to college. If the story is true....this line of cactus is at least 92 years old.
My daughter is coming home for Christmas.....and somehow I have to impress upon this modern young woman....that she needs to take an ugly pot of spiny cactus home to her townhouse. I have to somehow convince her she needs to occasionally water the plant....keep an eye on it..... and in a couple of years when the plant is full grown and the humidity is low....take the babies and make three more pots. Keep three pots together and keep one someplace else as a safeguard. I suppose I will even show her how to make the medicine.....realizing she will think I am absolutely nuts.
But it is time to transfer the cactus....time to give a piece of it away to my daughter....and tell the story and hope some odd day....she will be look at it with wonder..... could it really be this ugly cactus has been cherished by so many generations of women?
What a very strange glue....to hold a line of women together.
the new babies in their pot
the original plant ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
