Apothecary Rose

The connection between American publishing and the English houses that supported them were as clear as day to me, as a young apprentice at St. Martin's Press. Editors went on annual buying trips "across the pond" to partake in the comfy literary markets of murder mysteries and tearoom gardens that are so quintessentially British. Excepting for some technical difficulties present in the differences between printing processes, our repackaged series were the house staples we could all rely on. Murder mystery readers are overwhelmingly female, and surprisingly devoted to their fictional, crime-solving heroes; a pat, easy formula that's the perfect armchair read on a chilly autumn night, served with a warm cuppa on the side.

Until a certain female protagonist caught my attention. Because I produced the advance reader copies sent out to reviewers, I usually knew the manuscript well enough to talk about it, and because of the lulls in my work, I actually read most of them, too. We did a bunch of medieval murder mysteries that sought to capitalize on the commercial success of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose". This one began similarly, but with a twist: the prime suspect was also the chief investigator. She was a female apothecary working as a laywoman within abbey walls, tending to the same medicinal garden that produced the deadly herbal used as the murder weapon, found on her shelves. Neat plot twist, right?

I was reminded of my own botanist mother who'd cried foul play over my child's bouquet, picked to cheer her up during one of her many "moods". "Agh!" She dramatically cried out when I presented my flowers to her, at her bedside. "That's 'deadly' nightshade!" Oh? Pretty purple flowers. "Are you trying to poison me?!" Uh, no...but, thanks for the tip. End scene, cut, aaannnd...fade out.

Aside from the theater of her daily undoing, I learned a lot about the power of plants from her. She often knew their Latin names by heart, and if we couldn't readily identify the wildflowers we found, we'd look them up. She knew the trees around us by the shape of their leaves, and the colors they changed in the fall. It was a beauty and magic to me that lengthened into homesickness for the forests of my northern woods. Never would I forget the shape of sunlight slanting through the trees, or the happy yellow of a early spring daffodil.

It's become grounding to me with every move I've made, a steadying process that keeps me down-to-earth in a sea of change; collecting specimens, looking them up, and then pressing them between the pages of books. That is the strength of our collective gifts as a mother and daughter: a knowledge that is straight and true. 
And so very beautiful.

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2017/09/14/england-to-be-re-dedicated-as-dowry-of-mary/

Oregano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregano

Kids from Rockland County don't know shit about real drugs growing up, because our hardcore city parents wanted to give us a taste of the "good life" in the country, where the air is cleaner. We live a wholesome lifestyle that's hard for some transplants to adjust to, accustomed as they are to the networks of "Gotham City". It can be harder to survive if you're, say, a hardcore racist redneck "Welfare Queen" (no one cares about your insane ideas about some "confederacy": http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/07/confederacy-of-dunces.html), or a pampered Nuyorican playing the fake minority card you think you have as darker southern European looking to game a bunch of crazy white women from the dykey "Social Do-Gooder" class of condescending pseudo-intellectuals. Uh uh. Not here.

And that was part of the charm for us, too. We were such quick New Yorkers that our one childhood foray into the hinterlands of the Northeast known as "Pennsylvania" (it borders New York State), saw us immediately bumped up a grade or two, just for being able to read things like "maps", which are crucial for a successful urban childhood. The rural teachers in that small mountain town were both charmed and in frightened awe of us, because we could speak as children, too. How....odd. Yes, that's it. That's what our educated genetics were to their brand of "townies": strange! We considered it flattering to be their opposites, because even a toddler knows that the flip side of "bad" is "good", like turning over cards in a playful card-matching game, or sorting shapes and sizes to fit inside a colorful plastic ball, one of my all-time favorite pastimes as a very little girl.

It was a good variation early on in habitation among different types of communities: the big city life, rural mountain towns, and then the rather bucolic country charms of a newly settled Rockland County suburb, still ripe with farmland all around us. We grew strong and outdoorsy and independent, though the farm kids left us bored, and then that congealed into an excruciating pace that felt like an eternity, even with the advanced classes in a very good public school system, with our Regents exams and college credits received before our senior years. Waiting to move on while stuck in someone else's bad head is torture for the gifted class, like putting a "Special Needs" child in a foreign language class, just to watch them surely explode in a frustrated rage. It felt like that for me and my friends.

So, we did what every smart kid does while waiting for older humans to figure it out, get you out, or give you help that never comes until it's too late in its cruelly unnatural suppression. We naturally turned to experimenting with fruity wine coolers (kiddie taste buds=marketing genius!) and cigarettes, in the lull that's intellectually like one long hot summer with the constant drone of cicadas in the background, as a white noise we couldn't tolerate anymore. I took my PSAT's and I think one SAT test at the high school either drunk and/or high, just for the thrill of it. I had a nearly perfect score on the English side of it, without even trying hard or studying beforehand (surprise surprise), and I still didn't need any classes or credits to graduate as a senior. What would you do, if you were me and still a child in someone's disordered household? We all had the same problems.

Because my friends at school were also older by at least a year or two (in deference to my "Irish Twin" brother, because my parents forbade me from moving up another grade as was natural for me to do, so as to not offend him with his Dyslexia, nor compete with my mom's early graduation that she was coached through by her gifted parents, huge artificial advantages for them both), they got into a lot more trouble way ahead of me. They had already dated and lost their virginity, were on birth control and/or having very early-term inductions so as to go through college uninterrupted or, conversely, plotting marriages through intentionally manipulative early pregnancies with a big fat Catholic wedding, in lieu of college. 

They were shipped off to rehab and/or their grandparents' homes, both here and back in the "Old World" (because it moves in both directions in the Colonies: America for the Euros living overseas, and Europe for the Americans established here), or upstate to "juvie" and mental institutions, all before I had my first date, first kiss, and/or first real teenage rebellion experiences. Of course, instead of teaching me anything with their knowledge, they sought to one-up the house genius, but I digress. That was anything I wasn't already used to.

Kids began sorting out addictive preferences according to their genetics. The obviously bad kids hung out at "The Wall", smoking and listening to po' white trash heavy metal. The Irish kids hid their homosexuality from their uptight parents with dubious hetero links to suburban normality. Smart kids hid behind their grades and their ingrained roles as "teacher's pet", loudly bragging about test scores that were largely determined by the test designers' conceits as a scholar (publishing is like that, too). The rich Jewish kids already had Ivy League lawyer/doctor/dentist/chiropractor fathers who "made it". They just had to not screw up badly enough to wind up in jail. And then there was me and my friends, cooler than any one particular strata, and adept enough to straddle as many roles as we had to adapt to, taming stresses long held in our families as best as we could.

We developed habits and coping skills as we needed them, as we watched our parents' lives fell apart. We became parents, mentors, elders, and counselors before our time, inadvertently pole-vaulting ourselves far above the heads of the generation immediately before and after us, the good results of which you are reading about now, as the "X" that marks the spot for you to find treasure, on the road-map we laid as our joint beneficial futures. We became law enforcement, clergy, teachers, social workers, activist, artists, writers, and philanthropists, without the corrupted money inherited from other people's labors, because there was none to be had. We would have donated what we didn't need, anyway.

And so, when me and my friend Molly were bored in homes empty of mothers, we fiddled with grown-up stuff, like any teenager running a household would: we played with the stuff that was around us, and available for us to use. She delved deeper into drugs, alcohol, and sex, to a level that scared me, but I was interested in any experimentation that made time go by faster. We giggled as we recollected the smell of "pot" (marijuana). It kinda smelled like burning oregano! Kids that we were (and already experienced cooks, which girls were expected to know how to do, in our large traditional households), we found the spice on the shelf and dived right in. Here it is!

We had cigarette rolling papers, but no real drugs, because none of us liked the time it took to go into the cities worst neighbors for something as silly as dried-out weeds. Not worth the risk. We didn't have the money or the cars that'd make the drive into town either, scant as our working class resources were (are), because every single one of us had to have after-school job(s). We took our badly-wrapped pseudo "joint" (a rolled marijuana cigarette) into my mom's bathroom, because her small powder-room had a window we could crack open to dispel the strong smell, only to be promptly discovered by my "Irish Twin" brother now home from school, too. He banged on the door to scare us, and we laughed even harder as we tried to put out the burning paper in my mom's tiny bathroom sink. Oh, well!

What did we learn from this banal experiment in recreational party tricks? Well, since we'd already taken lab classes with dissections in junior high school, not much. Unlike other pantry items (<cough> meth monkeys <cough>) that the much harder and more ingrained addicts around us must have known could give you a "buzz", we simply found out what we already knew at the outset of our funny little time-waster: oregano is made for better things, like spicing up a Sunday dinner spaghetti sauce, but I'm sure you kids today are much hipper at this kind of stuff than we were back then, what with the decriminalization of cannabis as your "Medical Marijuana" today, because of its mildly narcotic medicinal effects, and all. GenX did that, too.

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/340818/Better-Off-Dead-Movie-Clip-Nasal-Spray.html

Bad Medicine

As you well know by now, many of my very best friends are educators. I loved being around them in college, because we studied everything we could within the time frames we had available. For most of us, it marked the most intellectually free time we had in our young lives thus far, and we luxuriated in the company of other gifted educated people. Higher learning set our minds free, and our passions were something we desperately wanted to share with the world through our excellent communication skills, which brings you here to me today, and us, as a community, now.

That didn't stop us from deeply considering the past because as the saying goes, someone not well-versed in it is doomed to repeat it, and as working class kids, were just as keen at escaping the purgatories of our family homes as our trapped parents were. It just didn't work, for anyone around them. Through our studies, we put together the pieces we needed to change the world, often by looking at ourselves through our shared histories first. My first love and my best friend became history majors; she, as a female educator in a male-dominated field, and my boyfriend as a failed scientist first (he blamed me for that, of course), until he reached his loudly talkative stride as a history major and legal scholar (yeah, you're welcome, bro).

We had many fascinating discussions, as we filled in the gaps left wide open by our ill-prepared families over many beers and a toke or two, though we were all avidly aware that our wildest partying days ended upon graduation, because each and every one of us almost immediately entered the working worlds of commerce and trade, pairing our academia with the real world so as to fill in the gaps present there, too. It was less welcomed than our friendly community of gifted scholars, artists, writers, and athletes, because almost everyone is threatened by a samurai warrior at first, with good reason. You may suck as a human being, and that pisses off native New Yorkers who've been a happily blended people for centuries. You might not fit in with us, and that happens in societies often, especially during our younger years, as we adjusted to the dysfunctional around us, through intellectual problem-solving in various industries.

Because my crowd was heavy on the history, I parted ways with their deeper explorations as I filled out my curriculum, necessary as it was for us to do as individuals, but I kept pace with any content discussed, because I spent my youth reading, which became part of my vocation, too. One of the more interesting second year 200 levels was an oddly named enticement called "EHIS 232 History of European Witchcraft" (http://www.oneonta.edu/undergradcatalog/ehis-232-history-of-european-witchcraft.asp), which I was delighted to find still on the schedule, today. Well-done, snow-bound freaks! Keeping our cultural interests alive across the years has been challenging, too, because disordered populations often seek to banish from the history books their own checkered pasts, as inconvenient truths they no longer wish to confront or solve.

Not so with our crowd. We wanted to keep the flames of our ancestors lit through the invocation of our co-joined spirits through well-told stories, reflected in the enjoyable classes taught by professors equally passionate and adept at bringing the past back to life, in dark classrooms with brightly-lit screens filled with art history, through images of relics that we wanted to unlock and tell everyone about, sharing our common knowledge with as many minds as we could fill, empty as those containers often are among the common and sick looking to turn away from the lights of enlightenment, as antithetical to our group's ethos as it ever was.

One of the key pieces we put back together was the insulting truth behind our obliterated indigenous pasts, found here at this windswept mountain school, kept alive by torch-bearers from the past. We realized that traditional medicines made from local plants had been wiped away by the voracious greed of invading Europeans who sought only to reap the value from our harvests and leave, laying waste in its' wake. It'd begun a long time ago, with the arrival of exiled wackos from their own countries, infecting our countryside with their fevered cults of delusion, evil and dangerous as ever, free to spread like wildfire across the forests and plains of this land named "The Americas" by Italians who didn't bother to ask the dark people who lived there its name, spreading their diseases at the same time they planted their invasive crops laden with foreign-born vermin.

Their spooks and devils were the same as those in their Old World countries, specters hallucinated in deeply thick woods entered fearfully at night with the exact same psychoses that had their cults exiled by regions afraid of their illnesses, the same falsely-made leper colonies as ever, made from old women casts as witches by the rise of male-dominated European medicine, along with their strong inheritance of herbs and crops, now lost to the ages, to be picked up by those children of theirs adrift in a home world full of foreigners, made expensively strange with their imported medicines and crop-killers.

Today we take it back, as we tell each other again the cures we've always known to be true, activating them out of our very DNA, despite the condescending rich white man's sneers over "folk cures" that actually work, as scared and sick as ever with their typical lusts made out of greed and money, borne through our inflamed bodies aching to heal from the kind touch of a loving mother seeking to ease her infant's cries at night, through expensive salves and ointments sold to her by foreign-born, European-trained doctors who care so little for us that they would rather sell us salves made overseas and shipped here at our expense (loyal to another land and blind to our cries for help), choosing their tribes over our native soil, further impoverishing and bankrupting women and children by sickening them deeper still.

After years of expensive doctor visits with a Jewish/European white woman who bankrupted me to make her and her family wealthy instead, laughing at my concerns with her pad of rich snake oils sold through fancy white male sales reps sitting in her over-heated Brooklyn office, backed by years of continued prescription renewals that only temporarily relieved my eczema; nasty ugly rashes that bled and oozed in the pressure-filled public spaces rife with their sick, pressured by their pounding sickness over our cooling seasons here that they cannot tolerate, causing my body to burst into large red angry rashes by their continued European madness, misplaced as it still is by their relocation here from their ousting elsewhere. 

It's time to take a stand against their exile wrongly forced upon us here in the Americas, because not one of them during my many long years of their imposed poverty told me to use oatmeal as a homeopathic cure; not one single corrupt wealthy European-American. Not one link found online through their Internet searches controlled by advertising dollars back by Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, and Big Medicine, searches made at night, using expensive online access that women and children typically cannot well afford, searches made by a million concerned mothers looking to ease their crying babies at night with a simple dollar store cure like an oatmeal bath, with the same kind of poultices applied directly to their delicate skin, ones that cure, cool, and comfort at the same time. Well, you can rest easy. We're home. You can all go home, now. Sooner rather than later.

Cures done at home through common pantry items, by the numbers: http://www.solitaryroad.com/s815.html

Their pricey European/American store-bought versions: http://www.aveeno.com/product/aveeno-+baby+eczema+therapy+soothing+bath+treatment.do

You sick fucks! Baby powder, moms: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/athome/talcum-powder-and-cancer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_wheel

Addendum: I'd like to add that my eczema has become far worse with age, greatly assisted by: global warming (sweat adds salt to the body where it wouldn't normally be, during normal cooling-off seasons), stress greatly exerted upon me that has been confirmed over the years as purposefully done as a means to detract from my beauty through the application of abusive pressure that would (hopefully) cause sickness in me (as part of the continued oppression of my people that I inhabit in a daily role), and that this Jewish-American doctor I sought out (after two other female doctors moved out of the Park Slope section of Brooklyn) took a Hippocratic oath to heal and not hurt that was put into direct conflict by her continued recommendation of an Israeli-made ointment that she said (defensively) she prescribed to me because I was a female athlete, and therefore I needed a synthetic non-steroidal salve, even though I never needed a test as an amateur athlete, nor do low doses of steroidal salves show up in modern testing. 

I should also add that she was extremely hostile and aggressive to me at first, as was her entire office staff (several of whom were fired, like the office women from a previous doctor I saw during my time in Brooklyn), as were the other female practitioners she recommended to me. It should also be noted that the main ingredient listed for this salve is "petrolatum", a petrochemical derivative that's wide usage and distribution is a continued sales boom to fossil fuel manufacturers, and their waste by-products. 

Take from that what you will. M

Acadian heads-up: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/fashion/26skin.html?_r=0 

Colored heads-up: http://www.softeeproducts.com/products/treatments/indian-hemp-hair-and-scalp-treatment/

Cocoon

All of my life I've had healing powers, so much so that my mom (who likes to play skeptic) was forced to tell me so directly to my face. It's a huge "win" for me, but a severe loss in her magically passive-aggressive "Wonderland of Rightness", with rules according to "Dr. Diane". She pretty much had to, because I've nursed her through such severe injuries, breaks, falls, and surgeries, that there were times when, even in her delusion fantasies, she didn't think she'd make it back, going so far as to say to me a few times "I'd be dead without you". Fear not, New Yorkers; she'd lapse right back into snarky self-righteousness, right after I picked her up off the floor. Again. 

In this century, we have companies with paid personnel who exist to help old ladies from their apartment floors and cloudy senses of reality, with such great hits from my mom like: "I was very athletic when I was young. You don't know!" Really? What did you do? "I walked bridges! I used to walk all the time." Yeah, I know. It's called "New York", not "Oz", and you were sixteen years old at the time, which means you should be able to walk a few miles, and you did it one time exactly. What else?

"No, no, no. I used to ski. I'm an excellent skier!" When? Once, on your honeymoon in the Poconos, so you could make fun of Dad comin' from broke-ass Bed Stuy because you knew he wouldn't be able to do a rich white man sport the very first time he put on downhill skis. Or, was it the time you tripped playing tennis and broke your back, which we nursed you back from? "OK. Let's change the subject. You're getting on my nerves." That's what I thought. Win all over it.

It's right up there with her superior sense of martial arts skills above me and my very-belted bro, because years ago I introduced her to Tai Chi while I was taking classes. I showed her a video I had on hand, and then I either gave it to her or bought her one of her own for Christmas, but, basically, my deal. She went home, found a "Bubbies-only" Tai Chi class in Westchester that's sit-down in a chair, then bragged to everyone for years about how "good" she was. "See? Look at me punch. Look, Marie! I'm really good at it! My teacher said so." Good at simulating punching...yeah, I know you like to hit.

Anyway, back to reality. Everyone in my family who's had direct contact with me gets healed. My cousin Susan beat Stage 4 lymphatic cancer, and she was the only one in her control group to do so. She chain-smoked cigarettes the whole time, too, much to my dad's embarrassment when he picked her up after her doses of chemo curbside, as a small bald child with a headscarf was wheeled into the facility. Wave "hi!" to them! She also beat the secondary cancers afterward, knowing the aggressive treatment she had was the cause. 

Of course, it isn't magic. She had the right attitude, and she did everything her doctors told her to do (rare for her personality type), plus she was motivated to heal for her son, who would be orphaned if she died. Then, my dad had cancer. He beat it, too. Ditto with my mom and her sisters. Of course, they all used traditional Western medicine, as well as some homeopathic kinds, too.

It's become such an open thing with me that I don't even really try to stop people from making the connection any more, mystical guru powers aside. I made friends with an odd but friendly Korean lady who was taking martial arts at the same dojo. She really sucked at it, but she wanted to make herself feel better from both physical and mental symptoms, so she continued with it, despite an utter lack of focus, continuity, muscle mass, and talent. After she figured out that a few cheap kickboxing classes do not cure you from being a lonely orphan in a new country or painful sciatica, she decided to add into her already ridiculously over-packed life Acupuncture classes, at a professional school in Manhattan.

Over brunch one morning, she played with light conversational sparring techniques that are much more effective in Asia than New York City, where we knew all the flava's here, honey. By now, she knew I was some "big-time" Art Director in publishing, which meant her prior career as a commercial print-making designer for a Chinatown textile firm that fronted her the money to relocate here meant squat to me, though I was delighted to learn that she was artistic at one time. She then worked in massage (got that down, too) and her new studies at the traditional school of medicine that's part voodoo folklore mixed with some basic common sense.

After she cleaned her plate way faster than me, a sophisticated salad of greens perfectly dressed for summer, remarking on the deliciousness of the food in every restaurant I took her to during our brief friendship, she said to me that I should seriously consider becoming an herbalist at her school for Asian folk and their wanna-be's. After a few more outings with her, when I casually body-surfed expertly in an ocean she was afraid of and then schooled her in my 'hood, I noticed that she gradually distanced herself from me, in that way that I've come to know as the typically passive-aggressive Asian lady brush-off. 

I could see that she didn't have much to come back with, and I didn't have the heart to tell her that my mom was one of the first female botanists at the Bronx Botanical Gardens, or that the devoted people of my faith have made real discoveries in medicine that are now worldwide cures, from the traditional abbey herbal gardens that span thousands of years. She wasn't listening to me, anyway.


Yes, my Asian peoples of the world: it's time to get over your "foreigner" fears. School is now in session! Please to enjoy the following links:
http://www.scienceinschool.org/2013/issue27/monastic
http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/medny/herbgdn1.html
http://bit.ly/1KpoTz4

Toothpaste, and Other Acts of Kindness

Simply organic, with no bullshit added.

When the last of my so-called "natural", big, name-brand toothpaste ran out, I went back to the shelves of the truly hardcore section of my local grocery store, the ones holding actual organic products, for a replacement. You see, that "Uncle Tom" of a brand has Sodium lauryl sulfate in it (http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/13/sodium-lauryl-sulfate.aspx), along with a host of other chemical baddies, which directly conflicts with its supposedly wholesome brand. Huh. A company that lies to the consumer? No. Can't be!

Well, the actual healthy brands are priced so far out of reach of the average consumer (in the $8-10 range, a complete joke for working families struggling to make ends meet), that I knew I had to find a better solution. Like any good herbalist, I trusted my instincts to guide me in the right direction. And there it was online; the solution presented itself to me under me deft fingertips: a recipe for making my own toothpaste at home, and here it is: http://www.crunchybetty.com/homemade-toothpaste-want-to-ditch-the-fluoride?printthis=1&printsect=1.

I had some mint leaves that were turning quickly, so I cut some up and put it in the first batch that I made. Unfortunately, without a bunch of preservatives, real food spoils quickly. Yuck! The next batch was truer to the recipe: coconut oil, baking soda, peppermint oil, and some organic Stevia to take the edge off of the extreme saltiness that comes with baking soda. At first my gums tingled a bit and then ached lightly (not in a bad way, more like the itch that comes with a small cut healing), but, you know what? When I brush my teeth now, I see no blood in the sink, and I brush a couple of times in a row with my homemade toothpaste to get that clean feeling I like.

I was told years ago that I had the early onset of periodontal disease by a dentist, and that I needed really expensive planing (a intense type of cleaning, done in sectors, over a couple of visits) of my teeth to remove plaque, for which there is no cure, according to the slick, hip, Brooklyn dentist I saw. Truth be told, I have always seen blood in the sink from my gums when I brush my teeth, even as a small child. Some dentist or other always told me just to continue brushing my gums, and that they would "toughen up" over time. But, it never happened. Until now.

You're welcome.

p.s.- I took the remaining mint leaves and some of the organic peppermint oil to the bath with me this morning, and I feel quite moisturized. Expensive spa treatments, indeed.