Sassafras Magic and Lore

Pluck
the mitten-shaped leaves from the sassafras tree, then snap their stems and inhale the warm spicy sweetness. Once a guest here dug up a root and we made sassafras tea and talked about how root beer, made with sassafras, used to be actual alcoholic beer, and that sassafras twigs used to be toothbrushes, and it's good for lots of other stuff. Like what, I wondered today, and looked up all sorts of lore:

• Every part of the tree is fragrant.
• A ship, boat, or bed made of sassafras wood will keep evil spirits away.
• Tuck a leaf in your wallet or business till to stretch the money you already have. I tucked leaves between the checkbook's and account book's pages.
• It's lucky to carry some dried sassafras root with you when seeking a job.
• Rub the leaves on wounds or skin eruptions as an antiseptic and anti-bacterial treatment. That'll probably work better if the leaves haven't turned their autumn yellow.
  
• Sassafras tea is a "toner," meaning it will enhance health. The U.S. banned it in 1960 but it has been legally available since 1994. The safrole in sassafras was carcinogenic in rats given huge doses. It is now thought that no human can ingest that much safrole even if they tried, and nutmeg contains safrole too. Most store-bought sassafras drinks use artificial flavor.
  
• Dried sassafras leaves, ground up, make that "file" stuff without which gumbo is not gumbo.
• Woodpeckers and wild turkeys like the fruits.
  
• There used to be a huge sassafras industry: American sassafras was exported to Europe, where the tree is not native. Europeans liked the wood for ships and furniture. They also used sassafras as a cure for syphilis.
• Germans used to call it "fennel wood."
  
• Sassafras is the "triple goddess" tree because any one plant can have three kinds of leaves: ovate, single-lobed, and multi-lobed.

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Happiness is a Warm Gun

I'll call it guano. Birds at my feeders left several spots on my porch screens, and just as you don't leave guano on a vehicle or your hat you don't leave it on aluminum screening either, for more than a season. The screens are beneath the eaves and rarely washed by rain.

Removing each screen and spray washing each with the hose was too much work. Spray washing the screens while they were in place, from the outside, would force guano inward onto the porch when that was the opposite of the goal. The screen frames are also old and fragile and the screening very delicately sandwiched between their pieces -- can't power-wash. And when the porch walls get wet the paint peels.

Rooting through the garage found me the answer: the old plastic-embedded-with-glitter "Splash" squirtgun, one of two. The pink squirtgun I'd favored got clogged with hard-water residue. This one still worked, and I'd kept it for 10 years thinking someday I might need it, and smack my butt and call me Sally, after filling the squirtgun with warm water I stood inside the porch and with skillful aim squirted water outward through my screens and I was pleased as punch that probably no one else in the county did the exact same thing today.

That Blue October Sky

Try explaining how blue the October sky is, how it grips even the loneliest spots on Earth and in the mind until they glow and seem meaningful when the rest of the year we don't look twice. 

 

Driving home I saw this sight and could have kept driving but scolded myself, "Time was when you'd turn around, stop, park and stand in the road to take a picture to share with everyone so they could see what you see, feel the reverence, how great it is to live here and now. Is that time gone? Are you old or just lazy? Maybe taking it for granted? What about beauty? What about awe?"

 

So I found a place to park and backtracked up the road, walking past a field of dead sunflowers on long thick stems much taller than I, with weird little gray birds shooting in and out of them. I stopped and saw they were goldfinches, not lemon-yellow anymore but wearing their duller winter corduroy. High winds roiled the grasses and treetops and filled my ears. If a car were approaching I would have to feel it through my feet. But there was no other car and I got my photo. Happy October.

You Wouldn't Be the First to Drown Here

Small wedge-shaped park on the Big River now called Rockford Beach, where I had a secret spot for fishing, has a short run of rapids, and despite all the warning signs they have now, people keep drowning in it. Today although I saw no people in the grass the parking lot was full. It so happened that a whole line of like 25 men waist-deep on river's opposite shore were rescue-service workers being trained.

There's barely any "beach," and the wardens say not to eat fish out of the Big, but on hot days families wade there, splash around, and swim across although it's forbidden, aiming to climb the rocks into that eye-socket hollow in the photo -- that's private land -- and they get caught in the current. When I moved here (19 years ago, as of tomorrow) just above the rapids was the remnants of a grain mill. After the floods of '08 -- and the Big River is the first to flood and close the roads here -- the park land was gated and locked for years, I thought forever.

But one day it opened, with all traces of the mill erased. A sandbar "island" in the middle that had attracted too much attention has been replaced by riprap. But it still has, like, the smallest and mildest-looking rip-snorting rapids, for professionals to practice with.

Goofin' Off at the Pharmacy

To build muscle, people my age need more protein, so driving home from the hair place I became roast-beef-sandwich-minded. But first, like most people my age, I stopped at the drive-up pharmacy, where I'm well-known. Charming pharm tech "Tonia" came to the window and microphone. Feeling goofy I said, "I want a roast beef sandwich. . ." and we laughed and she said, "So do I, bring me one, with fries," and we laughed some more.

On the day my hair is cut and styled I am very cute, so I chose this day and hour and really cute earrings to pick up my prescription because I'm flirting with the male pharm tech. As you know, proving your identity at the drug counter requires reciting your birth date. (When waiting in line, I am fascinated by everybody's birthday.) It happened that on one visit, after I told my birth date, the good-looking male tech said, "You're Aquarius? So am I," and we began talking zodiac signs & comets. We banter whenever he waits on me. Last week at the window he asked what I thought about the latest solar flare, adding that he plays trivia online at a local place, and I am thinking: He's cute and he's sweet on me.

Yes, I know that only batty old ladies think the pharmacist is a hot number.

Today he angled Tonia out of the window and said without preamble, "It wasn't our sun that belched, it was Beetlejuice." I was momentarily confused -- I didn't recall having a son with him, but anything is possible. Then he said, "Beetlejuice, the star. Last week I said the sun, and wanted to correct it." He meant Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion. Recently astronomers saw a very unusual flare erupting from that star. By now I'm like jelly with silliness.

I said Betelgeuse is not in the zodiac so it doesn't affect us.

Tonia, with my bag of goodies, bumped my boyfriend away from the window. It was Aquarius hilarious. She wanted a signature and a form of payment, etc. and I tried not to laugh. As I took my crisp white paper bag she asked -- it's required -- "Do you have any questions for the pharmacist?"

Cracking myself up, I said, "Why was I born?"

The Old Horseshoe

The old bent horseshoe came with the house and hung above this particular door, outside, "heels down," for, like, 15 years until one nail came loose and I took the shoe down and left it by the door intending to nail it up again, and today was the day.

It's iron, all right: hot from the sun. I admit I'd never seen or touched a real horseshoe; this one still has one horseshoe nail. Age and origin unknown. Horseshoes repel evil. The tale is told of an Irish blacksmith confronted by the Devil, who demanded shoes for his hooves, right now! The blacksmith nailed on such painful shoes that the Devil screamed, pried them off, threw them aside and vanished, never again to bother humans at their work. (If you are idle, that's another story.) The Devil, traumatized, hasn't come near a horseshoe in ages.

It's also said their crescent shape or iron content repels evil spirits and that's why it's hung above the door.

Furthermore, it's said that nailed with heels up, the horseshoe is filled with, and retains, good luck. The Divine Cabin's horseshoe had been originally nailed heels down, and plenty of folks advised me that was not lucky. The lived experience with that door -- the late Demetrius's favorite port of entry to the room he favored and trashed -- was unlucky. Others say "heels down" lets the luck pour down on everybody passing through that door. Well, that's an old wives' tale, seems to me.

I'm lucky to be the owner and beneficiary of a real horseshoe, and to have the Divine Cabin, am probably the world's luckiest person, and want to keep my luck. Nailed the horseshoe up best I could, crooked and off-center, but hey. Or maybe I should turn it sideways. But then --  heels to the right or the left?

The Last Summer Sunday

So it is: the last Sunday of summer 2020; autumn equinox is September 22. Did I have a good summer? I did my best, like everyone else, and for the first time in life ate garlic any darn time I pleased. On October 1, I have lived here 19 consecutive years, not counting the 14 months' sublet in 1998-99. Filled the hummingbird feeders to ensure the birds won't leave me. (Smile; of course they must leave, always in September's final week.) But hickory nuts began falling and exploding on the roof weeks ago, and a monarch butterfly sat on a coneflower here on August 1 -- rather early for signs of autumn. 

On the walk today, luxuriated in all the greenery, noticing, compiling a mental keepsake. Missouri goes autumn overnight. Maybe a week from now it'll be golden rather than green.

Interior signs of autumn: Scramble out to get a flu shot. Wink at the good-looking pharmacist. Unbox the "happy lamp" and use it as lighting at Zoom meetings, something unheard-of a year ago. Ordered all new winter clothes, i.e. long-sleeved silk undershirts, hooded sweatshirts, and pants with fleece interiors; new coat, socks and sneakers; and the fresh flannel pajamas ought to arrive soon. One last wash and folding of the summer sheets before exchanging them for flannel. Huge dinner plates of chili spaghetti and excessive emotions about hot drinks (I love my coffee, but didn't know my coffee loved me.)

Some folks don't like autumn, but at the equinox it's only 90 days until the solstice, and when I was in my 20s and complaining, a fellow worker in his 60s said, "Don't wish your life away."