Selling dog tongue

There was a plant that grew in the woods that looked like a dog tongue, and that was what we called it. My Grandma would get a sack and go in the woods looking for it. It took her a long time to fill the sack. She knew the woods very well and the best places to look for dog tongue.

When she got back home she would clear a spot in the yard and spread it out for the sun to dry it, then she would put it back in the sack. A man came to buy the dried plants. Sometimes she would be paid about $100. My mother told me that they would use the plants in making medicine.

My Grandma is no longer with us. The plants still grow in the woods, but not as much. There is no one I know now who still gathers this plant. It helped her pay the bills. She was a single woman, and she had to do what she could to make it.

Mary J. Corbett, Ivanhoe, Four County EMC