China Bayles' Book of Days (5 page)

All Hail to the Moon, all Hail to thee
I prithee good Moon reveal to me
This Night who my Husband (or Wife) must be.

You must presently after go to Bed. I knew two Gentlewomen that did thus when they were young Maids, and they had Dreams of those that afterwards Married them.

—JOHN AUBREY, MISCELLANIES, 1695

ENHANCE YOUR MAGICAL MOON DREAMS

Ruby Wilcox (who has cast a magical spell or two in her lifetime) suggests that you enhance your New Moon dreams with a romantic herb mixture. This ancient practice is a form of aromatherapy.

RUBY’S MAGICAL NEW MOON DREAM PILLOW BLEND

½ cup dried rosemary
½ cup dried rose petals
¼ cup dried lavender flowers
½ cup dried lemon verbena
½ cup dried mint
4-5 whole cloves
1 cinnamon stick, broken

Mix all ingredients. Tuck into a muslin bag and place inside your pillowcase or under your pillow. If you want a stronger, dreamier scent, add a few drops of essential oil (rose, lavender, or verbena) to the mix.

Learn about dreaming and dream pillows:

Making Herbal Dream Pillows—Secret Blends for Pleasant Dreams
, by Jim Long

In winter, when the moon’s horns are sharply defined, expect frost.

—TRADITIONAL WEATHER LORE

JANUARY 16

Pleasure for one hour, a bottle of wine. Pleasure for one year, a marriage; but pleasure for a lifetime, a garden.

—CHINESE PROVERB

Fruit, Herb, and Spice Liqueurs

These wonderful drinks had their beginnings in medieval monastic gardens and stillrooms. Many are easy to make, but they do take time to age. If you start now, you’ll be offering your liqueur to guests at your summer outdoor dinner parties, spooning it onto ice cream for a delightful hot-weather dessert, or adding it to the marinade for your holiday duck.

ROSE GERANIUM BERRY LIQUEUR

2 pints blackberries or raspberries
1 cup fresh rose geranium leaves
4 cups vodka
½ cup white wine

Syrup:

1 cup sugar
½ cup water

Combine the berries, geranium leaves, vodka, and wine in a wide-mouth jar with a tight-fitting lid. Steep for one month in a cool, dark place. Open and crush the berries slightly with a potato masher and steep for another 4-5 days. Strain, pressing the juice from the berries, then filter through a coffee filter or double layer of cheesecloth. To make the syrup, bring the water to a boil in a small saucepan, add sugar, and stir until dissolved. Cool. Add half the syrup to the liqueur; taste, then continue to add and taste until it is as sweet as you like. Pour into a bottle, cap it, and age for three weeks in a cool, dark place. Makes about 1 ½ quarts.

SPICED PEAR LIQUEUR

8 ripe pears, juiced (about 4 cups juice)
2-inch piece gingerroot, peeled, sliced
1 whole nutmeg
1 cinnamon stick
4 cups vodka
½ cup white wine

Syrup:

2 cups sugar
1 cup water

Combine the pears, gingerroot, spices, vodka, and wine and proceed as above, steeping for 5 weeks. Strain, filter. Make the syrup and add as above. Bottle and age for about 4 weeks.

Read more about making liqueurs:

Cordials from Your Kitchen: Easy, Elegant Liqueurs You Can Make & Give
, by Patti Vargas

JANUARY 17

Today is Blessing of the Animals at the Cathedral Day.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

—JOSEPH ADDISON, 1672-1719

Just for the Birds: From Susan’s Journal

One of my great delights in the winter is to watch the flocks that gather around the bird feeders that my husband, Bill, has built at Meadow Knoll, our 31-acre corner of the Texas Hill Country. Most days, I can look out my kitchen window and see a dozen different kinds of birds, all feasting together in harmony. (Well, relative harmony, that is, until one of the bird bullies—a jay, or a red-wing blackbird, or a big white-wing dove—shows up.) The bird seed is their staple diet, of course, but I always put out generous servings of my homemade bird pudding.

JUST-FOR-BIRDS PUDDING

½ pound lard
1 cup crunchy peanut butter
½ cup raisins
½ cup sunflower seeds
½ cup mixed bird seeds
¼ cup honey or molasses
about 3-4 cups cornmeal

Soften the lard and peanut butter brieflyin the microwave to make it easier to mix. Add raisins, seeds, honey or molasses, and as much cornmeal as the mixture will absorb. I keep this in the refrigerator and soften it in the microwave when I’m ready to put it out. I “butter” it directly onto tree branches and place big dollops of it on the tops of bird feeders; it will, however, stain tree bark. You can also freeze it, cut it into square blocks, and insert the blocks into suet feeders.

OTHER WINTERTIME TREATS FOR BIRDS

• Hang strings of popcorn from tree branches, or scatter popped corn with the other seeds in the feeder.

• Many of summer’s flowers will provide dried seeds for tasty winter treats for birds: sunflowers and coneflowers, especially. Store them in mouse-proof tins or in the freezer.

• Punch holes in a mostly-empty orange or grapefruit half (leave some for the birds!) and hang from a tree branch.

• Be sure your birds have plenty of fresh water—and keep the ice clear so they can get to it.

Read more about being a bird’s best friend:

The Backyard Bird Feeder’s Bible: The A-to-Z Guide to Feeders, Seed Mixes, Projects and Treats,
by Sally Roth

As the days lengthen,
So the cold strengthens.
—WEATHER LORE

JANUARY 18

On this day in 1990, I began writing
Thyme of Death
, the first China Bayles mystery.

If I’d known how the week was going to turn out I would have sent it back first thing Monday and asked for a refund.

—THE OPENING LINES OF THYME OF DEATH:

A CHINA BAYLES MYSTERY

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Crime: About China’s Books

I created China Bayles because I was interested in writing about herbs, gardening, and mysteries. I had lived in Texas since the 1970s, and I was already growing herbs in my garden at Meadow Knoll, the thirty-one acres where Bill and I live in the Hill Country. China abandons her career as a criminal defense attorney (much as I left my own university career) and buys Thyme and Seasons herb shop, in Pecan Springs, Texas, halfway between Austin and San Antonio. Her best friend is Ruby Wilcox, a six-foot-plus flamboyant redhead who owns the Crystal Cave, Pecan Springs’ only New Age shop. China and Ruby would be good partners, I thought: China is the dry, sometimes cynical voice of reason and logic, while Ruby is a True Believer who always leads from the heart. I decided that every book would have a “signature herb” that would define the theme, and that I would include as much information about herbs as I could squeeze in without slowing the story. Here are descriptions of the first two books. You’ll find others throughout this
Book of Days
.

THYME OF DEATH

Life is good for China Bayles. She lives in a neat apartment behind Thyme and Seasons, she has some great gal pals, and she’s in love with ex-cop Mike McQuaid. But things go awry when China’s friend Jo Gilbert is found dead and China uncovers a stash of torrid love letters from someone who is now very much in the public eye.

Thyme has been used for centuries to preserve and season food and as a cough remedy, a digestive aid, and an antiseptic. In the Middle Ages, the herb was thought to be an antidote against fear and nightmares.

WITCHES’ BANE

Halloween is supposed to be scary—but the holiday hijinks in Pecan Springs are hardly your everyday kids’ pranks. The all-around creepiness culminates in the Halloween-night murder of one of Ruby’s tarot students. Ruby becomes a prime suspect when a mud-slinging minister accuses her of New-Age witchcraft.

Witches’ bane, wolfsbane, and monkshood are all names for the deadly herb aconite, said to be the creation of Hecate, the goddess of the underworld. Through the centuries, the herb has been used to kill wolves, poison wells, execute criminals, and commit murders. Its root has occasionally (and fatally) been mistaken for horseradish.

JANUARY 19

Today is National Popcorn Day.

[Peruvian Indians] toast a certain kind of corn until it bursts. They call it pisancalla, and they use it as a confection.

—BERNABE COBO, SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NATURALIST

Popcorn

Popcorn has been around for a lot longer than Super Bowl Sunday, movies, or the popcorn man in the park. The oldest popcorn ever discovered (more than 5,000 years old) was found in a cave in central New Mexico. Grains of viable popcorn—so well preserved that they can still be popped—have been found in ancient tombs in Peru. Today, the average American eats seventy quarts of popcorn a year.

The menfolks at China Bayles’ house—her husband, Mike McQuaid, and teenaged stepson, Brian—put away more than their share of popcorn, especially during the long winter evenings. To cut down on the salt, China makes herbal popcorn sprinkles. For your next movie night or TV football game, put out those super bowls of popcorn with a variety of sprinkles in labeled shaker-top bottles, and let everybody choose. Each recipe uses dried and finely powdered herbs and makes about one-half cup. A great kids’ project—unique gifts, too!

MIX-N-MATCH POPCORN SPRINKLES

• Mama Mia Sprinkle: 2 tablespoons each of basil, thyme, marjoram, garlic powder. Serve with a shaker of Parmesan cheese.

• Creole Crazy Sprinkle: 2 tablespoons of paprika; 1 tablespoon each of onion powder, garlic powder, oregano, basil; 1½ teaspoons salt

• Mexi-Corny Sprinkle: 2 tablespoons each of chili powder (mild, medium, or hot), parsley flakes, cumin; 1 tablespoon each of onion powder and garlic powder; 1 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes, salt

The Aztec Indians strung popped kernels of corn and made them into ceremonial headdresses, necklaces, and ornaments. These were worn in honor of their god, Tlaloc, the god of fertility and of rain.

To learn more about popcorn, read:

Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America
, by Andrew F. Smith

JANUARY 20

Zodiac: Today or tomorrow, the Sun enters the astrological sign of Aquarius.

The eleventh sign of the zodiac, Aquarius, an Air sign, is ruled by a pair of planets. Its first ruler was Mercury; its second, Uranus, discovered in 1781. A fixed sign (suggesting strength and resolve), Aquarius governs intellect and originality. Aquarians are intelligent, unorthodox, and inventive. They may also be detached and uninvolved.

—RUBY WILCOX, “ASTROLOGICAL SIGNS”

Herbs and Astrology

Until a few hundred years ago, the idea of writing about astrology and herbs together would have seemed perfectly natural. In earlier times, people saw all things as parts of one coherent whole. They applied their understanding of one aspect of the cosmos—the planets, say—to all other parts: the plant and animal kings, for instance, or the human body. They called this the Law of Correspondences: As above, so below. As in the macrocosm, so in the microcosm.

In this scheme of things, certain plants were classified as “belonging” to certain planets, and were thought to be useful to people who were born under that planet’s influence, or to people who suffered ailments related to that sign. In modern times, Aquarius is said to be ruled by the planet Uranus, but the ancients ascribed the rulership to Mercury, which also ruled the human nervous system, the respiratory system, and the shoulders, arms, and hands. The plants that belonged to Aquarius were those thought to be ruled by Mercury.