Herbal Humor, Week Six

Herbal Humor, Week Six

1. Tonight Bridget was wearing a velvet witch’s costume with red and black striped tights. “I like it when Halloween comes around,” she told us. “I get to go to the stores and pick out clothes that most people would only wear on Halloween but that I would wear all year round. And I got the tights in Iceland. If you ever need tights, Iceland is the place to get them. They have wonderful tights and socks in all sorts of different colors and patterns, and, well, yeah, that’s all there is for shopping there. In fact, there is so little shopping in Iceland that when the women need new clothes, they book plane tickets to Minnesota and shop at the Mall of the Americas. I guess it’s cheaper to go to the Mall of the Americas than it is to go to Europe and buy new clothes.

2. Looking around Bridget’s house, there are a lot of interesting decorations. Most predominantly there are fairies, but she also has a dollhouse displayed on a high shelf. The dollhouse has four rooms. In the first room there is Jesus and a wizard playing together on an Ouija board. In the second room, another wizard watches over two black baby Jesuses. In a third room, John Lennon guards the door as a fairy takes a bath. In the fourth room, Jimi Hendrix plays his guitar to three sleeping fairies.

3. “When Sunny and Rainbow were sixteen and twelve, they came home from what I thought was school, and they came running in to show me their new tattoos,” Bridget says. “Naturally, I was furious. ‘Tattoos?’ I asked. ‘You are twelve and sixteen! Who on earth thought you were old enough for tattoos?’

‘Mr. Wizard,’ Sunny and Rainbow told me.

‘Mr. Wizard? I’m going to kill him. How dare Mr. Wizard give you girls tattoos? He should know better.’

Sunny, you see, had gotten some sort of flower tattoo across her stomach, and Rainbow had covered her leg with dolphins jumping over a rainbow. I knew they would regret these tattoos in the future, and I told them that.

‘But, Mom,’ Rainbow replied, ‘We had to get the tattoos while we were still young and brave.’

‘Yeah,’ Sunny said. ‘And we thought you would be proud. Before we went into the tattoo shop, we took Rescue Remedy to make sure we should do it.”

I was furious, and so I punished them both, but secretly, I was a little proud that they had remembered to take their Rescue Remedy.”

4. In discussing common sense in first aid, Bridget discussed proper labeling. She shared several stories where improper labeling caused major medical emergencies. A grandmother who hadn’t labeled her bleach cup left it sitting on her kitchen counter. Her granddaughter, thinking it was Sprite, drank the bleach and ended up with major burns to her esophagus, throat, etc. She emphasized always labeling your items properly, and as incentive to do so, buy labels you think are beautiful because you will enjoy using them.

Later in the class, when discussing burns, Bridget pulls out a homemade salve from her refrigerator. The salve is meant to be applied topically after being burned. “Ignore the label,” Bridget says before handing it to KingSoopers. “It says that it is chocolate, but it isn’t. It’s a burn salve. You don’t want to eat it.”

5. “Using steak on a bruised eye like the Little Rascals actually does work,” Bridget said. “But let’s face it. This is Boulder. You are probably going to have to go to fourteen houses before you find someone who actually buys steak.”

6. Bridget suggests applying castor oil to warts to make them go away. Castor Oil, in its plant form, is called Palm of Christi (Christi meaning Christ) because it is a green five-leaf plant with a red dot in the center. It looks like the palm of Christ with a nail driven through the center. “When my children were little, they and Tom all ended up with warts at the same time. I told the girls to apply castor oil to it and pray to Christ for the wart to leave. I told them to visualize Christ healing them. I totally believe in Christ and His power to heal; after all, I grew up in a Christian home. Tom, however, does not believe in Christ, and so he applied the castor oil every day without any visualization or prayer attached while my daughters applied the castor oil every day while praying and visualizing the healing power of Christ. Within days, both Sunny’s and Rainbow’s warts had completely disappeared and Tom had seen no improvement in his. Within weeks, he still hadn’t seen any improvement and we had to try a different remedy to get rid of his warts. So, well, I’m just saying. That’s what happened. Take what you want from it.”