Faith, Folklore, and Friends

There is an old superstition that says whatever you do on the first day of the new year, you will be doing all year. My Grandma Gean was a firm believer in this.  She made a few extra dollars by sewing for people in the neighborhood, everything from quilts to underwear.  One year on January 1st, she was behind on her sewing and needed to get some things done, and she disregarded the superstition.  Not long afterwards, she was called on to sew a burial gown for a stillborn baby girl. That did it for her; she never sewed another stitch on New Year's day. I'm 99% sure that this superstition holds no power; but there is the Chaos theory , and just in case, just if, maybe it will work for us this year. Time will tell.

Last Thursday night, Hub and I went to the Bailey Auction House auction on Chisholm Road north of Florence. I was able to buy these eleven snuff glasses for $4.  SCORE!!! I buy these old glasses just about every time they are offered at auction.  We love to use them for drinking glasses, and so do lots of other people we know.  There are some lead crystal drinking glasses in our kitchen cabinet, but I always get the snuff glass.  In the box of glasses we bought last week, we found this little tin, almost full of snuff.  Hub said we could keep it to use on insect bites.  Grandma kept a little can like this in her apron pocket, and refilled it regularly with snuff from the 8-ounce glass. This can is not too old, because it has a UPC code and a warning. Tooth loss? Gum disease? My toothless grandmother told us she started dipping snuff when she was six years old.  Her teeth were long gone before I was born, and her tongue and gums we...

I remember my Grandma Gean planting portulaca every spring in a battered-up dishpan.  She patched the little holes that wore into the aluminum until it couldn't be patched anymore, then it became a flower pot. She would fill the dishpan with rich dirt and plant portulaca seed she had saved from the previous year.  The common name for portulaca is moss rose, but the rose part had been lost, so we just called it moss.  Grandma wasn't trying to impress anyone by recycling, and if we had asked her if she was going green, she would have looked at us like we were crazy. She did it because she had a soul that required beautiful things around her, and she wasn't going to be denied by a little thing like poverty. So when Hub found a new used wheelbarrow at an auction, he was ready to take this one to the dump.  Instead, we put a little topsoil in it and bought a pack of portulaca seed. We can move it around with the sun, or in spots that need a little extra c...

Ruling Days is the traditional idea that the twelve days of Christmas are predictors for the twelve months coming up in the new year.  According to Google, this time is also called Kingdomtide, although I have never heard it called that around here. The first day of Christmas here was sunny but cold, which will probably be what we get in January.  Today has started the same way, too cold for me, but it could very well be what our February will be like.  It has been more than half a century, but I can clearly remember my Grandma Gean standing in front of her big wall calendar, the one that Rexall Drug Store gave her for free, and recording the weather conditions for each day during the twelve days of Christmas.  I can remember her referring back to it: "Well, June is supposed to be extra rainy, according to the Ruling Days." I wish Grandma was here to scoff at our weather satellites and the latest digital radar.  Her ruling days predictions wor...

I posted this blog about morning glories about this time last year. This morning, as I wandered in the backyard wet from yesterday's soaking rain, my Grandma Gean was heavy on my mind. Would she smile at my feeble attempts? Morning Glories may be the flower I have known and loved the longest. My maternal grandmother, Mrs. Georgia Gean, was a great lover of morning glories. She lived in a little four-room house that had been converted from an old church/school house. The front porch, with boards for the floor and tin on the roof, was built across the front of the house, which faced directly west. Grandma had dug up beds running parallel with the porch, on each side of the front door. Each spring, she would plant these beds with morning glory seed she ordered from a seed catalog. Long before the little plants were ready to send out tendrils, she built a trellis for them to climb on. Grandma knew what days in early spring would yield the highest sap, and that is w...