IT'S TIME TO LOOK FOR JOE PYE, THE "YARB MAN"

With the purple martins gone and the neighborhood children back in school a relative silence has fallen across the immediate countryside. The fiddling crickets have been there fiddling all along, but now you really hear them. Not only because heretofore louder noises have somewhat overwhelmed them, but they do get louder as the season wears on.

Suddenly a crow will break the somnolence of a lazy, late summer day, sounding extraordinarily loud since it is in an oak tree right at my doorstep. What has set him off, I wonder. Old Joe Pye?

We've had a super abundance of crows in the neighborhood this spring and summer. Since I'm always writing, tongue-in-cheek, about their Fall Convention, perhaps some of them hung around all summer to get political correctness into their platforms.

I doubt if the crows know anything about abortion, pro-choice, pro-life, etc. If they so chose, they could just lay their eggs and go off and leave them with possibly no crow-punction at all. They could even appease their consciences, if they have any, by rationalizing they have left food for the nest robbers who are somewhere in the chain of life.

As far as balancing their budget, they don't have any. Nor do they bother with color, cost of health insurance, unemployment. I'm not sure territorial rights are any big thing in their platforms, although I have seen smaller birds, probably sparrows, harrying a big crow off in another direction, nipping him on head, back, feet and wings.

Occasionally, of an afternoon, a dog breaks the silence for seemingly no reason. You look to see in what direction his barks are addressed but there is nothing nothing to most people, but I think I know what the dog and the crows see. It is the ghost of old Joe Pye moving amongst the bushes of the hedgerow, along the creek bank, or the edge of a grassy field, looking over his crop of wild "yarbs" (herbs) to make his medicines. Perhaps he finds some bee balm, fever few, tansy or bouncing bet. He might even be stooping down to pull up a clump of Eupatorium Purpureum which, although he (the ghost) may not know it, has become known to us as Joy Pye weed. We call it iron weed too.

Hal Borland, naturalist, says that a ledger kept by a tavern keeper in Stockbridge, Mass. has items dating back to the 1700's that show a Joe Pye bought a quart of rum for 1 s, 6 p. I guess that is one shilling, six pence. And another purchase by Joe Pye was one hat and 1 bu. wheat.

This Joe Pye was an Indian and famous for his potent herb medications. The name Pye has persisted in that Indian tribe down through the years.

I thought about Joe and his purchased quart of rum recently. A TV show was explaining how a very effective medicine could be made from the roots of the rudbeckia. I have a lot of the rudbeckia or purple cone flower growing in my flower border so my attention was caught. It seems that you should wash the roots thoroughly, chop them up and let them stand in rum for a while. This is supposed to draw something medicinal out of the roots. If there is not enough liquid left after this drawing process, you add a little more rum at the end of a week and let it set another week. If there is still not enough liquid to fill the bottle in which you wish to store it, you add still more rum!

I might grow a sweet potato in a hanging pot and dry some apples in the sun, but I believe I'll just use my rudbeckia for bouquets and as butterfly attractors.

I do like to look out of the corner of my eyes on an Indian Summer day when the iron weed is in bloom to see if I, too, can catch a glimpse of old Joe at work. Sometimes I think I do! A bush will suddenly move when all else is still and I seem to see an old worn hat down near the ground. But I don't speak to anyone about it except the crow and a dog for fear he or she will think I've got some of old Joe's fever-reducing medicine or some such down on a basement shelf behind an old washboard or kraut cutter.

REJOICE!