Making Medicine...Or How to Fight Paleness

I decided to make medicine tonight.

I was feeling a little pale.

My Lithuanian grandmother worried I was prone to "paleness"....a condition characterized by a lack of rosy cheeks and a robust outlook.

She cured me when I was a little girl.... by pinching my cheeks and giving me a shot of medicine accompanied by a few pretzels or salty potato chips--because, as everyone knows, salt holds your color.

My grandmother felt my paleness was the result of poor mothering. My mother was Polish and my Lithuanian grandmother believed Polish people couldn't possibly do anything right.

Grandmother was also suspicious that my mother wanted to squash my spirit which she believed was part of my Lithuanian bloodline. She saw herself ....and me.... as descended from a line of tough feisty women who doctored people in the rural countryside.

When I arrived at her apartment in my mother-approved little dresses , black patent leather shoes and white gloves (my mother used to make me wear white gloves to church).....she scowled at me.

She wanted me to "be a lady" but ....she didn't want me to be too soft.

When I left her house.....I always returned home..... red-faced and strong.... a shot of whiskey flaming my cheeks and enough starchy peasant food to herd oxen.

My mother would go berserk when she saw me.

Her sensor which detected both alcohol and peasant carbohydrates ... would go auuuuuwoooogahhhhh when I walked in the front door.

She'd stop my visits to grandmother for months...which made me sad.

As I made medicine tonight.....I felt close to my grandmother and wondered what she'd think of me.

I'm sure she would have approved my stint as a nurse. I think she would have pursed her lips in disgust at my travels in Asia and Africa....but in the end....would give them a grudging nod of approval.

She would have been pleased I was a wife and mother....but Grandma had....well..... an interesting arrangement with my grandpa and another man for many many years....and I could picture her pinching my cheeks and wagging her finger at me.....to make sure I never forgot "the spark"....she was well into her 60's and still dying her hair with tea bags so she wouldn't show any gray to the gentlemen who lived with her.

As far as my current job and situation in life.....I was puzzled......would think corporate work was the equivalent of wearing white gloves and a little dress? or would she be pleased to see me gritting my teeth and working hard?

I'll wait till the medicine cures in a couple of weeks....and ponder this .....

I've got some kielbasa in the freezer and I know where I can get some pierogies.....I may tap a friend for a few latkies......

perhaps with a belly full of medicine and peasant carbs .......I'll be able to see more clearly.

Medicine.

Fill 1/3 of a container with fine clover honey

Cut up...... in assorted sizes....plump unblemished stems of Lithuanian cactus

Add the stems to the honey

Add very good whiskey to fill the bottle

Gently roll the bottle till everything is blended.

Cure for 2- 3 weeks. Cactus pieces will sink to the bottom when ready.

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The Family Legend.....

Before I headed off to college, my feisty Lithuanian grandmother handed me a plant and a bottle of whiskey.

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

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