The Yard Book
I said the old people kept a hundred remedies. They did. Here is why I am still not handing you a hundred cures — what I am writing instead, and what I owe you about your legs.
You commented ROOTS because I said the old people kept a hundred remedies. They did. I grew up in the middle of them.
And I am still not going to hand you a hundred remedies. What changed is I found something worth writing down that was never a remedy to begin with.
Why there is no book of a hundred remedies
I could write you a hundred. I know a hundred. Any man from my part of the world knows a hundred, and half of them he only knows because somebody's grandmother said it once in a kitchen.
But a name on a list is not a remedy. A remedy is a plant you can point at, a way to make it, an amount, an hour, and an honest word about who should leave it alone. Do that properly and one takes a long time. That has not changed.
I still write the remedies one at a time, and you still get each one as it is finished. No hundred. However many I can stand behind.
What has to be true before a remedy goes in
- I have to be able to name the plant. There is a root everybody calls strong back. Four different plants wear that name and the bag does not tell you which is inside. It is famous and it is in every roots bottle ever written down, and it is still not in any paper of mine.
- I have to have made it myself. Not read it. Made it.
- It has to say what it does not do. Every paper of mine has a page of things I refuse to claim. If a paper has nothing on that page, I did not work hard enough.
- And if it goes in as "every day, forever," somebody has to have watched people do that. Not a rat. Not a dish. People. Almost nothing clears that, which is why almost everything I give you is sometimes, not daily.
That last one cost me a remedy already. You will see it in the paper about the three.
But most of what the old people kept was never a remedy in the first place. It was how they stood up in the morning before the knees agreed to it. How they carried water so the back did not pay for it by Friday. When they fasted and when they did not. How a woman my grandmother's age moved through a full day of work without the stiffness that has half of you reaching for a pill by ten o'clock.
Nobody needs a study to write that down, and I am not asking you to trust it the way I ask you to trust a remedy. It was never sold as a cure. It was just how the day got done.
What We Kept
That is what I am writing now — not a hundred remedies, more than a hundred and fifty of the rest of it: how we moved, how we ate, how we rested, how the body kept working without a pill for every part of it. I am not vouching for each one the way I vouch for a remedy. I am putting down what was kept, plainly, before it is gone between now and whoever comes after me.
It is not finished. When it is, the people on this list hear about it before I say a word in a video — same as everything else on this shelf.
About your legs, since that is why you are here
I owe you something before the shelf.
In that video I told you swollen legs are the lymph backing up, and that clearing it takes you back to how your legs felt in your twenties. I gave you parsley, lemon, cucumber, hot water.
I want to walk two of those back.
The promise
Twenties was a foolish thing to say. I said it because it sounded good. No cup takes a body back twenty years, and if you have been standing on those legs for forty years, they are the legs of a person who has stood for forty years. A cup can make an evening easier. It does not make you young. I should not have said it and I am saying so.
And the part that matters more
Legs that swell on both sides are not always a plumbing problem in the legs.
Sometimes the reason sits in the heart, or the kidneys, or the liver — and the legs are only where you can see it. Those are the ones where a warm cup is not just useless, it is expensive, because it buys time that a person did not have to spend.
Go and be looked at, before you make anything, if:
- The swelling came on fast, or it is worse in one leg than the other.
- You are short of breath, or you wake in the night needing to sit up, or you cannot lie flat the way you used to.
- Press your thumb into the swollen place for a slow count of ten. If the dent stays after you take your thumb away, show that to a doctor.
- Only one leg is swollen and it is warm, red or painful. That one is today, not this week.
- You already take a water pill, or a pill for your heart or your kidneys.
I am not trying to frighten you. Most swollen legs by evening are exactly what they look like — a long day, a hot country, gravity. But I cannot see your legs from here, and the man who can is at the clinic.
If none of that is you
Then the cup from the video is a fine cup and I stand behind it as a cup. Parsley, lemon, cucumber, hot water, late morning.
Two things I did not say in the video, and should have:
- Parsley pushes water out of you. If you already take a water pill, that is two hands on the same rope — ask before you add mine.
- Legs up beats any cup. Twenty minutes with your feet above your hips does more for an evening than anything I can boil. It is free, it is boring, and it is the honest answer.
What is on the shelf so far
Three papers, and each one has a correction in it. That is not an accident. A man who has been talking for years and has never taken anything back has not been paying attention.
Yard Roots — the morning pot
Ginger, fever grass, sorrel, pimento. Five things from any Latin market. The pot I boil for my own people, and the roots I refuse to put in it.
What the Liver Keeps — the okra paper
The glass of okra, done properly. And the mark on the neck that I called the liver in the video, which is not the liver, and which is the most useful thing I have ever put on paper.
Two Bushes and the Dark
Cerasee and moringa, exactly how I make each. And the third of the three, which I take back.
Before you take more than one
Do not run them together.
These were written one at a time, for one trouble at a time. Several of them move the same things in you — your sugar, your water, your pressure. Three of my pots in one day is not three times the good. It is a thing nobody has ever watched, and you would be the first.
One at a time. Give it a good long while. And keep taking your medicine, exactly as your doctor gave it — nothing on this shelf replaces anything in that bottle.
What happens next
When I finish a paper, the people on this list get it before I say a word about it in a video.
And if I ever change what is inside one — if I take a plant out, or a bag turns out to be something else, or I learn I was wrong again — you hear that first too. That is the whole reason I asked for your name. Not to sell you anything. So I can reach you if I have to take something back.
Give thanks.
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