Mama's Home Remedies: Discover Time-Tested Secrets of Good Health and the Pleasures of Natural Livin, Svetlana Konnikova [classic fiction .TXT] 📗

in place for two hours. This potato compress is an effective anti-inflammatory healer. It helps to treat eczema, painful corns, and acute dermatitis. These compresses can be used every two hours several times a day.

R 24. Mix one teaspoon honey to ½ cup potato poultice and use as in #23. R 25. Make ½ cup fresh organic potato juice mixed with honey as in

#23. Soak a gauze napkin in it and apply it to the affected area. Honey is a valuable ingredient with its nutritional and antiinflammatory properties. R 26. Put slices of raw potato on eczema sores to soften and heal them. R 27. Make a nutritious mask for dry, inflamed facial skin that is sensitive to dermatitis. Cook one potato, skinned and chopped, until soft. Crush it and whip with one tablespoon sour cream or two tablespoons skim milk. Apply to your face for 15 minutes. Wash it off. Look in the mirror. Your skin wil be soft and glowing. While potato flowers can be pretty accessories for women, they are a natural medicine as wel . The wisdom of folk medicine found the use of them in a treatment of cancerous tumors. See #28. R 28. Wash potato flowers and dry outdoors, out of the sun. Add one tablespoon dried flowers to one pint boiling water. Simmer for two to three hours on a hot stove. Drink ½ cup three times a day 30 minutes before meals. Do not consume more than four quarts of potato infusion per treatment, each of which lasts a week. Repeat three to four times a year.

34 ^ Mama’s Home Remedies

R 29. Potato starch is also a good anti-inflammatory remedy. Use it instead of a powder to treat sensitive skin.

Grapes

There’s no doubt that the potato is a great healer. Now let us look at the wonders that grapes can work.

Let me tel you what I learned in my childhood about these miraculous berries. One warm evening in June my sister and I were sitting on our porch with our grandma, looking at the grapevines and big oak trees that bordered it. The grapevines found these green giant oak trees to be a comfortable resting place. They climbed up to the top of the tal est oaks and then dropped from the summits to the ground. They looked different there than in our vineyard. These vines were like big mysterious and strange lianas that looked as if they belonged in a distant tropical paradise somewhere on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. Grandma, who had finished her errands and assumed Grandfather’s place on the porch to enjoy a quiet evening telling us the rich, colorful stories she loved so much, broke the silence. “Now we’ll open again our pot of gold. Are you ready?” Grandma asked us.

What she called our “pot of gold” was simply her endless collection of unforgettable fairy tales. Grandma had a rare gift for infusing a special force into ordinary things or creatures surround us. I never had my fill of her stories and I was afraid that one day she would deplete her storehouse of fairy tales. But she always assured me that I should not be worried; she still had plenty of them from different parts of the world.

She could look at the smallest flower or animal and then tell stories about their lives. She wove a story as if she were tatting beautiful lace—a mix of fantasy, charm, and wisdom. Her stories became for me a way to see the world and to learn about it.

“Today, girls, I’ll tell you the story about how the grapevine was born,”

Grandma began.

A Healthy Spirit Lives in a Healthy Body @ 35

Once upon a time when the Sun and Earth were

young, they were good friends. On the day

when they both became 18 years old, they married.

Nine months of their happy marriage passed quickly and

their daughter was born—a grapevine. They gave her the name Ampelos, which means “grape” in Greek.

The Sun-father caressed Ampelos with his shining warm rays and washed her with sparkling and refreshing rains. Her mother, Earth, fed her generously with vital juices from the flowers, herbs, and trees. She grew up fast and became a tall, slender beauty.

She gave her parents millions of smiles and small grandchildren—grape berries. They appeared on a vine and ripened before the sunrise came. The first small berries blushed all over with the pale pink glow of the morning dawn. People in the village had never seen such a miracle in their lives. They came from all over to see it. Some approached the vines and tasted the berries. People liked them so much that they ate them all at once, but the vines did not stop growing and miraculously grapes appeared again and ripened again in just about six hours one day.

People were truly amazed. They observed how the grapes drank the gold juice made by the midday sun. They gathered a second time at the rich harvest and ate it all. After that, the grapevine stood empty. She had given everything she had to the people. But blessed by Sun and by Earth, Ampelos came up again in the late evening with new deep-blue and navy-black berries, which took the color of the southern night.

From this day on, Mother Nature gave the small children of the grapevine a generous gift of all colors that you can imagine: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, navy, purple, and pink. And Nature made the grapevine the only plant in the world with berries that are painted with all colors of the rainbow.

“Tomorrow,” promised Grandma, “we’ll go to the vineyard and you’ll see how some grapes have all shades of white, green,