There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.."

"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance, pray love remember", says Ophelia in Shakespear's Hamlet.  

I've always loved to "get lost" down country roads, just taking a turn here and another there and seeing where the road takes me.  I figure I'll always find my way home eventually and along the way I might see something really interesting.

I enjoy "surfing the web" (does anyone use that phrase anymore) for the same reason. I can start out on one website and find a tidbit or two of information, click on a link and I'm off on some other pathway.  The amazing thing to me, though, is how much time I loose doing this!

But anyway, I subscribe to a weekly newsletter published by one of my favorite mystery writers, Susan Wittig Albert.  Ms. Albert is also an herbalist and her news letter is called "All About Thyme".  You can subscribe to it from her website www.abouthyme.com.  Every week she has some interesting information to share about the world of herbs and other things.  One week she talked about one of her favorite books for herb information called Sacred Herbal Healing Beers. I couldn't help myself. I ordered the book from Amazon and I've been amazed at the information and beer recipes it contains.  Did you know you could make beer from weeds like chickweed and burdock and stinging nettles? 

The beer recipes in the book don't really appeal to me much, but the herbal information is very informative.  I grow sage, lavendar and rosemary in my herb garden. From one of Ms. Albert's newsletters I read about the memory enhancing properties of these herbs.  That line about rosemary and remembrance is really talking about rosemary's traditional use to aid memory.  Sage and lavendar do the same thing. A Sage is another name for a wise person after all.

 Everyone in my family is always complaining about how they can't remember anything, so I decided to make each one a pillow pouch of "memory enhancing" herbs so they could sleep their way to a better memory.  I used both the Sacred Herbal Healing Beers and my favorate on line herbal source www.botanical.com to research herbs for their memory enhancing properties. The three best were sage, rosemary and lavendar.  I cut and dried sage, rosemary and lavender from my garden and fashioned simple little eight inch square pillows cut out of left over cotton sewing scraps with pinking shearers and stitched three sides with my handy sewing machine. Then I filled the pillows with a mixture of the three herbs and sewed the pillows shut.  I presented them to several family members and they seemed delighted to get them. We will see if one, they put the pillows inside their bed pillowcases, and two can they sleep with the scent of the herbs all night, and three, do they remember things any better. 
So if you've read this rambling blog all the way through, you see how the road leads you!