Mullein and Wild Cherry From the Sunday Afternoon Rocking Series by Jan Philpot   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. 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'sRemedies' 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 neighborsof 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 sunshineand 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,' anold-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 myworld…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.       (Note: Afternoon Rocking messages are meant to be passed on, meant to be shared...simply share as written without alterations. ..and in entirety. Thanks, jan) Sunday Afternoon Rocking columns are distributed weekly on the list Sunday Rocking. This is not a "reply to" list, and normally only one message per week will come across it, that being the column. To subscribe send email to Sunday_Afternoon_ Rocking-subscribe@yahoogroups. com   Order my new novel from Hearts on Fire books!  DREAM PAINTER is a time travel romance.  Check it out at: http://www.heartsonfirebooks.com/downloa ds.aspx?categoryid=26   Author website: http://jan-edmonds.com/