Lost and Forgotten

I believe we should do best with what our parents and their parents leave for us. It's hard to understand for me that some people would ignore the heritage of ancestors. Nevertheless, I am not the one to judge if they did that. Modern civilization is bot helping to preserve the learning and experience our grandparents possessed. 

Knowledge seems to be easily accessible in our era. For this and probably many other reasons my grandmother did not pass on the recipes and teachings of her mother who could cure, it seemed anything, with..... right, it looked like anything with anything, but still she needed to know what it was exactly that she needed to use. 

Her name was Tekla, a simple woman living in a Polish village and raising her six children. Life was not very predictable then. She however, did what she could to be a good wife, mother and a woman, like other women in the village. She knew her role well. Everybody did. You had no time to waste. But, first of all, you were close to nature and nature provided for you in many ways. Whole family had their household duties and was involved in making food and gathering supplies for harsh winters. Mistakes, forgetfulness or mishaps cost a lot, perhaps even lives. No currency was a common currency in the countryside as it was actually goods and services that were exchanged, almost like in the ancient times. And there were ways to get currency, like selling goods to city people. So, Tekla and even her children would pick up herbs and go to the city to sell them. They must have been more valuable than now, but I am thinking, their value is, however, the same to these days. The value of the herbs has been unchanged although their price (at least some of them) somehow got low. 

We started importing exotic herbs ignoring the powers of the herbs, our fathers used. The new standards of modern life do not agree with time consuming herb picking and so on. Herb picking requires simple life and closeness to nature to be truly fruitful. My grandmother and other Tekla's children started to associate the use of bark and plants with the poor life of her childhood and she abandoned most of it. Fortunately, I started to research it all early enough so that I hoped to find out and preserve much of lost knowledge.