Ruth: And ah. . . I. . . we used a lot of sage for seasonings, and also for soaking your feet when they were hurting, and ah. . . of the mountain sage. And let's see. . . I have to stop and think. . .
We used the lambsquarter, or the pigweed, we called it. . . for edible, and that's very good. We picked all of that we could find. And then the dock that grows down along the creeks—that's edible, and we ate—we ah. . . mother canned all these things, too, you know. And at that time, when I was quite small, there were lots of wild raspberries on the mountain.
BH: Ah huh.
Ruth: And we picked every one of those that we could find, and strawberries—wild strawberries. But Dad had a strawberry patch, and he also had a tame raspberry patch along the hillside, by that old—by our old house. And ah. . . then we had, of course, the crabapple trees and the apple trees. And he and John Crissman had a cabin above us, and John Crissman owned the ah. . . telephone company in Hooper. But he spent quite a bit of time in the summer up there—the Crissman family. And he and my dad were always grafting different trees, limbs on different trees, and trying to experiment with growing more apples. We had them, but. . . here, I mean. My mind is. . . I can't remember all the different things. But the. . . the. . . yellow colored transparent apple—
BH: Oh!
Ruth: We had a very good transparent apple tree, and ah. . . then we had the old Ben Davis apple tree that Grandpa King had brought the cuttings from Georgia when they came ah. . . to the valley. It was really a. . . it wasn't a good apple. It was kind of small, and wasn't real tasty, but we used everything.
BH: Um hum.
Ruth: We didn't. . . you know, with a big family, you had to.
BH: Yeah.
Ruth: And. . . for medicine, there was ah. . . we never used it, but it was an interesting—ah, an old man married an Indian woman, and I think his name was Myers—Jimmy Myers. And she and my mother, my grandmother, and Grandma King—my dad's mother—were ah. . . sort of the nurses in the area after my Grandfather Calkins had died.
BH: Um hum.
Ruth: And they delivered a lot of the babies, and if one of 'em couldn't, why the others could. So. . . but she went around, gathering all the moldy bread—all of the mold from any bread she could find in the neighborhood—and she had everybody saving their moldy bread. And she put it on ah. . . cuts and wounds, and it was surprising, I guess, that so many of them healed.
BH: Um hum.
Ruth: So there's your beginning of the penicillin and the ah. . .
BH: Antibiotics. . .
Ruth: Antibiotics.