Why is digging in the dirt therapeutic? Maybe it isn’t for everyone, but for me, it is. Yesterday, I finally got out to the herb garden, dug out grass and weeds, and planted a few herbs, veggies, a hollyhock, and some peppers. When the sun is on my back and my hands are in the dirt, I can forget all my troubles.
Flora enjoys herbs too. The new house she and Darcy built on Granny Grace’s acres has an herb garden just outside the back door. In Grave Heritage, Flora leads her visitors on a tour through her herbs.
My faithful followers trooped through the house, out the back door, and into the herb garden. Its tangy fragrance engulfed us as Mom, with Jackson at her side, beamed her flashlight onto the plants and explained the uses of various herbs and bushes.
“Lemon balm is good for tea,” she said, “and it smells nice too. I’ve made an ointment from these gray mullein leaves. Sage can be made into an occasional hair rinse as well as used in the Thanksgiving stuffing. But, even though these lily of the valley have beautiful little bell-shaped blooms, they are poisonous, as are many herbs and flowers. It’s best to have a healthy respect for them all and find out exactly what they will or won’t do.”
We moved slowly past Mom as she spoke, walking along the stepping stones, under branches of dogwood trees, and to the old orchard. Here, I stopped long enough to tell a story about gathering apples with my Granny Grace when I was a little girl, and the tasty applesauce she made. I remembered the scent of wood smoke mingled with the enticing aroma of apples which simmered all day over a wood fire in the back yard.
We wound past the orchard’s gnarled limbs and were in the cemetery.
“We aren’t sure who these people are,” I told my followers, shining my flashlight over the leaning gray headstones. “They may have been early settlers or perhaps Cherokee people.”
That’s the neat thing about being a writer. I get to include some of my favorite things within the pages of a book.
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