LEDGER COLUMNIST
I couldn't tell ginseng from poison ivy
Klonie JORDAN

Those were the good old days.

I remember my folks saying that when I was a kid. I always wondered how those days could have been so good when the "days" to which they referred were without indoor plumbing, television and a lot of other modern conveniences.

I was reminded of "the good old days" myself the other day during a staff meeting. We were talking about herbal medicines and someone mentioned ginseng.

"Any of you guys ever been 'senging?" I asked, knowing full well that none of them probably ever had but relatively certain they were familiar with the term or knew at least something of what I was talking about.

Nope.

They all looked at me like I was a talking chimp.

"You know," I said, nodding my head in an effort to perhaps somehow jar their memories, "going 'senging?"

They must have thought I was saying SINGING, because I'm pretty sure one of them muttered something about Christmas caroling.

It's not the same thing.

Me and my grandpa used to go 'senging a lot. The term is used to describe the process of collecting ginseng. For those of you unfamiliar with the old home remedies, the root of the ginseng plant, once it is properly prepared, is believed to cure everything from hiccups to the flu. It wasn't only used in homemade poultices and tonics, it was also used in store-bought remedies and brought a nice price if you knew the right place to sell it. I'm told it's still widely used today in a number of pharmaceutical items.

On a lot of Saturday mornings when I might have otherwise gotten into a world of trouble playing down at the abandoned sawmill (mom had declared it off-limits because she was afraid we would get buried alive under a mountain of sawdust) grandpa would take me with him when he went 'senging.

Grandpa would get up, put on his coveralls and eat his daily breakfast of biscuits, gravy and honey. Then he would go out to the tool shed and get the old rusted shovel with the cracked handle. Of course I was tagging along the whole time, like a puppy waiting for his food dish to be filled.

He would stick the end of that old shovel in the ground, take the bandanna out of his hip pocket with one hand and take his glasses off with the other. He would wipe the bandanna over the lenses, sometimes making them more smeared than before he had started. Then, pretending to concentrate on his glass cleaning and not looking directly at me, he would ask, "Boy (he always called me boy), you wanna go 'senging?"

He knew what the answer would be, so he would never really wait for me to respond. He would immediately follow the word "'senging" with, "well, go get me one of them burlap sacks."

The burlap sacks were tucked away under the wood box on the back porch. The sack was used to carry the ginseng home.

This procedure of collecting ginseng was more than just a huntand dig routine. It was more a ritual, more a sort of mystical adventure. I had always heard it was very difficult to spot ginseng and that only certain semi-supernatural individuals were able to do it. That made my grandpa something of a wizard in my eyes.

Grandpa was able to spot those ginseng plants right away, like they were calling out to him. Me, I could never tell the difference between ginseng and, say, poison ivy.

But it seemed like we would always go home with a nice bag of the stuff. Then grandpa would clean it and lay it out in the sun on canvas to dry.

I don't remember the actual time it took before the ginseng was ready to sell, but seems to me like it was an awful long time.

What I do remember is plodding through the woods with my grandpa, just happy to be allowed to go along. He taught me how you hold a blade of grass between your thumbs to make a whistle, how to whittle with the grain of the wood instead of against it and how to make snow ice cream.

And every time he would come home from selling that ginseng, he would always give me a quarter. "Here's your part," he would say. Then he would grin and tousle my hair.

Me and grandpa going 'senging.

Those were the good old days.

Klonie Jordan (editor@gaffneyledger.com) is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger.