My mother had no medical degree, but she knew what remedies to use with great results. She depended on her miraculous herb garden and wild herbs too. This was all handed down in families.
From a tooth ache to the mumps, to a hurt knee, to chicken pox and a sore throat, she had become an expert because she had an abundance of patients, her large family. One time she even used the leeches from a jar on herself. It was awful! I was ten years old and she had placed those leeches on her shins. She did it outside in the back garden and it was summertime.
Most of the early years I do not believe we had expensive health insurance coverage. Thankfully we were a bunch of healthy kids and did not need hospitalization. I attribute that to our genetics and my mother’s nurturing and homemade unprocessed foods with nutritious unspoiled by chemicals and unnatural fertilizers, raw ingredients.
My mother also nursed one of my nieces. My mother gave birth to my younger sister Anna, at 44 years old. My married sister Roula, who was named after our yiayia, Zafiro, Zafiroula, who was about 16 years older than me, also gave birth to a baby girl. This niece was a tiny, black haired, green eyed baby who nearly died. Her mother had no milk, so the baby was frail and starving.
I don’t believe baby formula was invented just yet. This was Greece after all and it was 1952. In my opinion life was about fifty years behind there than the new country called America. Now things are different. My niece would have died, her intestines were closing up, her pediatrician had said. That is when my mother started nursing this frail baby. She nursed my sister Anna and her granddaughter at the same time.
What a mom!!! So that baby received nutritious milk with the much-needed natural immunity that comes with it. My mother saved her granddaughter’s life. Grandmother Malama and granddaughter Thomai always had a special bond.
I don’t remember my mother sitting around much, idly. With so many children and grandchildren she was always making clothes on her SINGER with the foot pedal sewing machine. She also had bought the SINGER with a gold coin. In the evening, sitting around the radio she would be knitting sweaters, hats, scarves, cotton and winter woolen socks. I am describing the 50’s and the 60’s. I came to America in 1962.
She used to say a person needs 40 salt water baths at the sea, for their health. Later, I found out about thalassa therapy. She was right again. I remember going to the thalassa (sea) on foot and by bus, sometimes by motor boat.
These were day trips to different beaches. My mother, half a dozen children, just the younger ones would go for an outing which took place a couple, and sometimes three times a week during the hot summer. We tried to have 40 salt water baths under our belts for our health. Dipping in the salty Aegean Sea was medicinal indeed.
On the way back from the beach my mother would buy fresh fish and mussels from the fishermen, and that night we feasted on delicious, fresh sweet fish. That is what fresh means.
I remember the sun was sweltering hot when we were walking and sun bathing and sometimes we got sunburned. At night our backs were pampered with this plain, cool, wholesome, wonderful goat’s milk yogurt which my mother made almost daily.
We ate the wonderful yogurt and used it for medicinal purposes too. Its nutritional coolness pulled the heat out of our burned backs quickly.
She was a true homemaker. My father gave her a certain amount of money for the house. It was up to her to feed us, keep us in clothes, to doctor us, to entertain us, to raise us. None of her nine children ever messed with the law and they all grew up as upstanding citizens. She did a great job. My father was always in charge of outfitting us for the school year with new shoes, coats, jackets, our books, leather book bags and other supplies.
My mother had an extensive vegetable and herb garden from which she harvested for our meals daily. She also had one goat it was a white Alpine goat, Asproula which means Little White One. In the spring this goat produced as many as four baby goats (kids.) I remember one spring my mother gave birth to my youngest sister Anna and amazingly the same day Asproula had her three kids, that year. It was the 2ndof March 1952. I was just four years old and I can still see her little kids.
The extent of her farm animals also included a dozen chickens which produced the fresh eggs we were fed on a daily basis. Our large family was like the famous television show, THE WALTONS. We were a real close family without all the drama like the Walton’s. In Greece my family had lived through the terrible World War II, not just the depression. I will explain later.
The animals were not legal because we lived in the suburbs, not on agricultural land, not on a farm. Many years later my mother was told to get rid of them or be fined.
We only had the female goat so every year my mother would take Asproula to a neighborhood far away where one of her friends owned a male goat that you could smell his musky scent from a mile away, it seemed. There, they mated, and then we would walk her back to our home. It was all done on foot.
This trip entailed walking down a dried-up river or some ravine and then walking up again. It was a very memorable and exhausting adventure.
I remember this incident very well. I was about 4 years old. I walked in the goat pen and went to pet our goat. Asproula picked me up with her great horns and tossed me against the wall. They rushed me to the hospital. This was one of three occasions where I was so traumatized as a child. In a few days I was alright. I never touched Asproula again without supervision.
I remember when I got older my mother would take me to the Turkish baths downtown. We made a day of it. It was like going to a spa. Since we had no car we rode the bus. We carried with us our bath robes, bath towels and lunch.
These big dome marble throughout baths were built by the Turks when they occupied Thessaloniki for four hundred years. After we paid for the use of the baths we were handed a key to our room.
That is where we left our belongings. The baths had different degrees of temperature. The rooms were humongous. I could never tolerate the real hot baths, so we stayed in the first room. These baths were just for women. The men had their own baths on the other side, my mother had told me.
There were masseuses and ladies walking around in the nude that offered to scrub your back if you were by yourself and needed their help. The first time my mother took me there I was around six years old and I was real shy. I could not believe everyone was in the nude. After our long bath we would put on our thirsty robes and go to our room.
We ate our delicious lunch my mother had prepared for us, combed our hair and rested in our beds for a couple of hours. In the afternoon we would pick up a few groceries across the street of the famous baths and since we already had a lot to carry we would hire us a taxi. Then, we traveled in style. It was a special day my mother deserved, and we did this ritual a couple of times per month. We were squeaky clean with rosy cheeks. At our house we only had a shower, no bathtub to soak in and relax. Most people had just showers in their homes, so we ended up going to the baths to luxuriate our skin.
On Sundays we went to church on foot and it was all uphill.
By the time the liturgy (Christian service) was over, the children were starving, and my mother would buy each one of us, a koulouri. This was one circle two times larger than a doughnut of the most delicious crunchy bread with toasted sesame seeds which the vendor would sell outside the church, to hungry church goers. We had to take communion, so we had been fasting, we had no breakfast. Also, the foods we ate the day before were meatless and dairy free, so we were very hungry.
When we arrived at the house, we ate something light, to tide us over to the big Sunday meal.
One of the after-church light meals might have been, freshly made halvah. This is not what you buy at a Greek store today. My mother made halvah with something like cream of wheat, sugar and lots of fragrant delicious cinnamon and clove.
She would pick up her creation with a large soup spoon and place all the spoonfuls upside down on a large platter.
There,