My grandmother's memorials are in those hills

My grandmother, who grew up at the foot of Mudlick Mountain -- now part of Sam A. Baker State Park, was wise in the ways of edible and medicinal plants that grow wild in the Ozarks over yonder.

My grandmother, grandfather, mother and her five siblings lived up in the woods and made the most of those resources.

For example, my grandfather was, as far as I can determine, never employed for hourly wages during his lifetime, which was cut short by a fatal hunting accident one Christmas Eve. He skidded logs for a bit of income, and he cut men's hair up and down Brushy Creek valley.

So where did my grandmother get what little money it took to buy enough mortar to build a fieldstone facade on the underskirting of the front porch of the four-room house they all lived in?

It didn't occur to me until late in my mother's life to ask for these kinds of details. The stories my cousins and I heard about family life from before the Depression until World War II never dwelt on the lack of anything. Everyone else was eating squirrels and rabbits and deer and an occasional laying hen, too. This was not, in my mother's mind, a starvation diet.

One meager source of income for my grandmother was gathering wild herbs: roots and leaves. These items were mailed off to a company in Chicago, which generated a bit of cash, coins included, by return mail.

Springtime was important to plant gatherers in those days. Sassafras roots had to be dug up when warm weather enticed the sap to rise. No one could get a good start on life after a cold winter without some sassafras tea.

But my grandmother's knowledge of wild things went far beyond sassafras. She was wise to the healing power of some bits that were collected in the woods around the home place. Some of those items would be dried and used to brew medicinal concoctions. Some of the green plants of spring would be eaten.

Wild greens. If you have never had them, you have missed a wonderful part of the abundance of the wild.

Which also makes me think, as I do every spring, of wilted lettuce. I'll bet more of you have had wilted lettuce than wild greens.

The key to enjoying wild greens or wilted lettuce, as far as I'm concerned, has to do with the hot dressing involving substantial portions of fried bacon. There are thousands of hot bacon dressing recipes out there. Surely you or someone in your family has a favorite.

The other day my wife and I got one of those scrumptious beef kabob specials at Pilot House, which serves them up until they run out every weekend. Included is a salad with lettuce, cauliflower and broccoli all coated in this magnificent hot bacon dressing. What a treat, particularly this time of year when you're really hungry for wild greens and wilted lettuce.

The house where my grandmother added her touch of refinement with rocks and mortar has all caved in now. The fieldstone edge of the front porch was still standing when I was last there a few years ago.

But the porch isn't all that's left of my grandmother's handiwork. There's the sandstone cellar she built in the back yard. And the straight-as-an-arrow row of daffodils across the front yard, which produces hearty blossoms spring after spring, having been planted nearly a century ago and not tended by any human for close to half a century.

There is a tombstone in Meadows Cemetery that lists my grandmother's birth and death dates. It is a small, simple reminder of her all-too-short life. But I prefer to remember my grandmother, usually in the springtime, by her handiwork that survives in a brushy hollow in the woods. Seeing those daffodils is so much better than looking at her tombstone.

We all need reminders of who we are and where we came from. I have mine. I'll bet you do too.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.