I found a hand-written copy of my mama’s mother’s lye soap recipe recently, hand-signed by Grandma herself. Grandma died in 1936, when she was only 48 years old, so I never knew her.
Mama was well-known for the lye soap she made from that recipe. People came by our house begging for her lye soap, which she always gave away. We used it for everything, except doing laundry. For that, she used the new-fangled powdered detergent she bought at the corner grocery store.
Lye soap was Mom’s cure for chigger bites and poison ivy—well, just about every ailment. As soon as we got home from the farm, we bathed in lye soap. Then at night when we itched, she rubbed us with a bacon grease and salt mixture, (with some other ingredient in it, but not sure now what it was.) I can still remember going to sleep with that smell.
I also remember Mama praying way into the night and often slipping away to the dark bedroom during the day to pray. She was also known for her praying and people would come by to ask her to pray for their illnesses or troubles.
Now that she is 94 Mama brags that she never took an aspirin till she was 30 years old and working for a doctor. Yes, she takes medicine. We believe God gave us doctors and medicine for our good and God’s glory, but Mama has depended on her faith in God to heal and the home remedies God revealed to keep her family well all these years.
The Bible speaks of the River of God flowing from the Great Temple in heaven, in Ezekiel 47. It is a healing river, “because these waters go there; for they will be healed, and everything will live wherever the river goes.” Ez. 47:9 NKJV. “Along the bank of the river, on this side and that, will grow all kinds of trees used for food; ….Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for medicine.” Ez. 47:12
That river is in heaven, but God also put leaves of medicine and rivers of healing on this earth for us.
We survived a childhood of chigger bites, poison ivy, stepping on nails, splinters, cuts, scrapes, pokes, stabs, and injuries, by the grace of God, through the power of prayer, and mama’s old-fashioned, heaven-sent, home remedies.