At Grandma's House

I remember my grandmother on my father’s side, who lived to be 96 years old and who died in the late 1950’s, as a very tall and lean women, who always wore black or dark blue. My father told me that she had worn only dark colors since the day her oldest son, my uncle Willi, was killed in Russia in 1915. She had bright gray eyes, a large aquiline nose and a high forehead and wore her hair pulled tight into a bun at the back of her head. She did not suffer fools lightly and never set foot inside a church, even though she was a Lutheran and in that day and age and in that place everyone went to church on Sunday. If you didn’t, you were a hot topic of discussion among the upstanding ladies of the village. My grandmother didn’t care, she thought them all charlatans.

Her name was Karolina. We called her Oma. Among other things that may seem odd today, she believed that the bites of red ants could cure rheumatism and relieve the pain of sciatica. She was said to demonstrate that conviction by sitting bare-assed on a live anthill, with her wide black skirt spread demurely around herself. I never witnessed this spectacle personally, but my mother swore to me she saw it with her own eyes.

Her shelves and cupboards were full of all sorts of home remedies she concocted from various wildflowers and animal parts. There were always large green or brown bottles full of ants or arnica blossoms soaking and steeping in alcohol on the window sills. Mysterious small packages, wrapped in grease-stained brown oil paper, lay stacked in her larder. They were marked in precise German script that said badger, fox, goose, crow, rabbit, hedgehog and each was a remedy for a particular ailment. She did not own an icebox or a refrigerator. She prided herself in never in her life having sought the advice of a medical doctor, whom she called quacks and alchemists. Well, very few people consulted a doctor in those days in that place.

I dreaded going to her house, because her remedies stank to high heaven or stung like hell. You didn’t want to scrape your knees in her house or come down with a cold or an upset stomach. If you think iodine stings, you should try my grandmother’s arnica. Also called leopard’s bane, she kept the yellow daisy-like flowering heads in bottles with 45% alcohol to extract whatever it was that was supposed to be good for you. She’d pour this concoction over your wound and tut-tut your screams. You’d regret if for days afterwards. The alcohol-soaked ants were a remedy to ease muscle pains. She’d slather this gross-looking smelly gunk on her neck and shoulders and swore that it rejuvenated her and eased all pains. I never got to experience that ordeal. She believed that burning nettles were good for you, because they opened the pores of your skin. You should try that particular power cure sometime, if you feel adventurous.

And her teas, which were supposed to be good for everything from the flu, bellyaches and constipation, tasted God awful. You could complain all you wanted; she made you drink the stuff regardless. She had tinctures to put on warts, lotions against hair loss, ointments for eczema, all manner of creams, salves, infusions and elixirs. They all had one thing in common. They looked, smelled and tasted vile and revolting.
She also strongly believed that walking barefoot in wet grass or submerging your feet in ice cold water for hours at a time was good for your circulation and improved your general health.

I remember one time I’d gone for an afternoon swim in one of my father’s eel ponds. Unbeknownst to me, some of the local farmers had used that pond to get rid of their dead and deceased animals to feed the eels. Anyway, a couple of days later my body was pretty much covered in open sores. Today you’d call that a severe staph infection. My grandmother took charge of my case. She taped poultices of badger and rabbit fat on those sores and in a couple of days they were gone. So maybe she knew what she was doing. The eels didn’t seem to be affected by the bacteria in the water. My father sold them to hotels and hospitals in the area and never got a complaint.

My grandmother’s house was a large two-story stone house. My grandfather had been a forester and game warden. He had build that house with money earned from his real job, for shooting roebucks, small members of the deer family, considered a nuisance by the farmers in the area. He received one gold mark for each deer shot from the owners of the land. He’d shot thousands over the years before the First World War. The house had cost him 4,000 gold marks to build in 1902. The locals considered him a man of substance. I never knew my grandfather. He passed on a year before I was born.

The house had a major downside. It stood right next to the neighbor’s pigsty. In the summer the stink was unbearable. The pigs also attracted huge armadas of flies. As you may or may not know, Germans don’t believe in window screens. They seem to interfere with the enjoyment of their view. Maybe they have adapted a more modern outlook these days, I don’t know.

I can remember my summer visits to my grandmother’s house, with all the windows open, the curtains and walls of all rooms darkened by year’s of my grandfather’s cigar and pipe smoke and speckled with fly shit, every ceiling adorned with five or six dangling, dark brown sticky fly traps and flies buzzing everywhere. My grandmother didn’t seem to notice. I couldn’t stand it there. When my mother moved into that house after my grandmother passed away, the first thing she did after the painters left was to install screens on all the windows. The locals thought she was crazy.