What Sort of a Blog is This, Anyway?

Huh. This is really turning out to be an herb blog, no? I didn’t intend for it to be. It is suppose to be a blog about caring for a loved one, while living on farm. Why then, is there so much about herbs?

Taking care of a parent is stressful. If you’ve done it, you know what I mean. Although it is an opportunity that I treasure, there are times when I want to pull my hair out. No, really. My mother has dementia coupled with a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Which means that dishes must be stacked in a particular order, coffee cups must be filled in a certain sequence and light bulbs must be rotated so that they all ‘wear evenly’. There’s more, but I don’t want to bore you.

Don’t get me wrong. She has her adorable moments. She gave me a head of broccoli for Christmas. And she lined up all the dogs and gave them lectures on personal hygiene the other day, addressing them as ‘people’.

But I found that the stress was ‘killing me’. Quite literally. My blood pressure was up, my muscles were tense and I really couldn’t get much relief. I tried meditation, exercise, ‘getting out’. But nothing really helped. And then I realized that I had the answer all along.

My family has always been ‘herby’. As a child, I was the recipient of mustard plasters and comfrey tea. My mother told me about soap plant and miner's lettuce when I was four years old. I cooked wild foods for my kids as nature lessons. I’ve always made herb teas, grown gardens and ‘listened to the plants’. So why not see if there was something there that could help with my tension?

And I did. Frankly, my little ‘brew’ was a lifesaver. It’s safer than any pill and cheaper. But my success made me look deeper into the herb world. I have sort of a…er….’lot’ of science in my background. I won’t say it’s easy to sift through all the nonsense about herbs, but it does make it easier to actually look at the compounds that they contain and deduce an expected result.

And it’s fun too. Wintertime on a farm can be pretty…quiet. Well, ok, it does have its moments. Like the bear that came through last fall or living without power for two days during a windstorm. But on the whole, I’m left with a whole lotta research time.

So, that’s why the blog is so ‘herby’. Don’t worry. As spring arrives, it’ll get more ‘farmy’.