Home Remedies

M y mother often referred to my paternal grandmother, Maggie Mae Lanier, as somewhat of a hypochondriac, a person with health anxiety who worries incessantly about being seriously ill even though they have mild or no symptoms at all. I have a few letters Grandmother wrote to me, and in each, the first paragraph contains a brief summary of her health and ailments for the week. In February of 1988, she wrote, “Went to the doctor today. He changed my cough medicine and gave me some more bottles of medicine.” Later in that same letter, she wrote, “The doctor said I’d be better in a few weeks.”

When she was in her eighties, she ate a banana (she called it a “nanner”) every morning and a bowl of oatmeal.

“It’s good for me,” she explained to me one day. And you know what? She was right. Bananas and oatmeal are both celebrated for their fiber and health properties today.

So health was a central theme in Grandmother Lanier’s life. We think my grandmother got this “focus and worry about health” from her own mother, Deborah Daughtry Lanier, who raised her family during the time before penicillin and traditional medicine — a generation that had watched friends and family die from the flu pandemics that ripped across our country between 1918 and 1920. Women back then had home remedies to treat, ward off and prevent illnesses in their families. They used “wisdom” passed from one generation to the next. My father used to talk about seeing his grandmother marching across the field to their farm.

“I’d see her coming — walking fast — across that field. She’d have an apron full of pills and homemade medicines that she made us all take,” my father often remembered. “She made us drink something that was supposed to help us not get sick.”

I often wonder what that “something” was. Perhaps she made him drink a tiny dose of a poke tincture intended to stimulate the immune system. By the way, ingesting poisonous parts of pokeweed can cause nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, convulsions and even death.

Still, these folk remedies were all they had back then, and some actually worked. In both my Lanier and Jarriel families, the practice of mixing up a hot toddy for a sore throat was commonplace. I can remember coughing so much as a young child that my throat would be raw, preventing me from sleeping at night. My mother would walk me into the kitchen, sit me in a chair, and mix up the remedy right in front of me — a little warm water, a little lemon juice, a little honey and a little of the secret ingredient, bourbon.

“Just sip it,” Mom would say. I felt that magic elixir flow down my throat — coating it, soothing it, and opening up my air passages so that I could breathe again. And a few minutes later, Mom would tuck me back into bed, and I slept like a knot on a log until the next morning. It wasn’t really a remedy; it merely helped manage the symptoms so that my body could rest and fight off the infection.

Chicken noodle soup with a few crackers was also a go-to fix for a cold when I was a child. Again, soup isn’t really a remedy, but the warm, steamy liquid gave us relief from our congested noses and sore throats, and that was welcome, as was staying home from school and resting on the sofa watching “The Price is Right.”

Mom also kept an aloe vera plant growing in a pot on the patio for emergencies. If one of us burned ourselves, she’d break off a piece of aloe and rub its goo on the burn. It was somewhat relieving — and somewhat magical.

Eating prunes and drinking water help a lot of folks who deal with constipation. There are dozens of continued from page

pricey pills and supplements at the drugstore one can purchase to “unclog the human drain,” but prunes work great sometimes and have nutritional value. And I once defeated an itchy fungus growing on my husband’s back with tea tree oil, which worked better than the tube of “stuff” his dermatologist prescribed.

I’m certainly not knocking traditional medicine. In fact, I believe in preventive medicine, going to a doctor I trust and discussing my health with him or her in detail, and the value of vaccines and certain drugs and lifestyle changes to enhance health and wellness. But I do want to make this point: There’s a place for old-time folk remedies that have stood the test of time and continue to offer effective, natural solutions or relief. Passed down from generation to generation, some of these “old ways” connect us to the wisdom of our ancestors, and moreover, some actually work!