2024/25 SACRED OIL & BUFFALO HATS

My hand knitted buffalo wool hat.

Our poor mother. She skipped back and forth across that jagged line between encouraging her kids to be artistic and creative and being overwhelmed by the mess creativity makes.  I adore her for feeling compelled in any way to nurture our creativity. I know many parents who are driven by a need for order. I don’t blame them for this. I am, however, grateful Mom was invested and intrigued enough to let us experiment. Or maybe she was just too exhausted to stop us. 

I am grateful for my own personal inclination to make creative messes, especially if it includes making them with people I like. Not that I love the messes.  Oye Ve, the messes! I might add that I was blessed with the most magical surprise in that the guy I married, before I really knew all that much about him, is willing to put up with my messes. Don’t you think this is amazing?

When Dave asked my mother for permission to marry me, her response was:

“Well, Dave, you’ll never be bored. But you’re going to have to hire a housekeeper.”

I was frankly stunned at that response. I quite seriously had no idea I was a mess. I now know what my mother knew all along. I am a mess, in every sense of the word. And no, we do not have a housekeeper. We just live in the mess. I don’t want to have to clean up for a housekeeper.

The seven of us.
Family Reunions bring out the weird in everyone.

I consider myself doubly blessed because I had sisters on either side of me who celebrated, and still celebrate, my creativity. And I have a ridiculously creative brother. A couple of them, in fact. Their originality comes out in different ways.

Those of us in our family with major doses of creativity get to deal with ADHD, that blurse (blessing and curse) we love and hate.  George and I got unusually hefty doses. We can both hyper focus with the best of them. And skip through our days in such disjointed ways that when we lie down at night, just before we get up again cuz we can’t sleep, we can’t even recount just exactly what it was we did that day.

One of the many creative things I enjoy is figuring out what we will give our neighbors for Epiphany gifts each year. I’ve dipped beeswax candles, whipped gallons of cream into butter, boiled carrot pudding in muslin using Paul Revere’s original recipe, ordered turkey feathers for quill pens, steeped vanilla beans in Vodka for a year to make vanilla extract… stuff like that. This past Spring I got it into my head to try to make Balm of Gilead Oil. I got curious one day, reading scriptures, about what they meant when in Jeremiah it was written: “Is there no balm in Gilead.”

I feel particularly blessed to live in a time when we can so easily look up things and get an exorbitant amount of information within seconds. We don’t have to wait until the Library opens and hope they have updated Encyclopedias. I spent one sleepless night reading up on what Balm of Gilead Oil is, its benefits, and how it’s made. By morning I had it in my craw to make some myself. It’s made from the bulging buds of Cottonwood Trees, soaked in oil until their resin seeps into the carrier oil. It is useful for pain and inflammation, among other things. It has a beautiful and unique fragrance. My Native American ancestors would have known about it. My Great-Great-Great Grandmother was Cherokee. 

By the time I decided to make the oil I had missed the sweet spot for gathering the buds. I drove up into the canyons searching trees that might not have bloomed yet like they had down here in the valley, but they were already blooming up in those colder spots as well. So the next spring, before the snow was melted, I told George I had this idea and wondered if trees up his way might not have bloomed yet. The next thing I knew he texted me a picture of Balm of Gilead oil he had made during his sleepless night. He had found some felled branches behind his house in Midway UT, researched processes, used his obsessive understanding of science and figured out how to expedite the process with heat and chemicals. The next time I saw him he gave me Balm of Gilead Oil and Balm, hardened with beeswax.

The lengths we go to for a few tree buds. George and Dave.

That weekend Dave and I drove up to Midway with loppers and gloves and saws. George, whose neuropathy makes walking a problem, led us in his truck as far as the wheels would allow, then pushed through the field, back across the stream and into a cove of cottonwoods pregnant with impending leaves. It took some reaching and snipping to get enough twigs with buds. Our research had indicated that our best chances of gathering enough buds was to go out after a windstorm, so we went back to the truck and drove through that magnificent mountain valley in search of felled trees. Fortunately Mother Nature had left us a sweet treasure trove in clusters of fallen branches lining old roads and riverbeds. We filled the truck to overflowing. The lucky cars that followed us received the sweet fragrance of those buds as it wafted from the bed of George’s truck.

A truckload of cottonwood twigs.

It took me two days to pinch the buds from those twigs and branches. The bucket of little brown nibs looked puny compared to the truckload we had labored to find.

It’s actually pretty amazing to have a crazy creative brother. Last month I was changing the strings on one of my guitars and I noticed one of the bridge pins was missing its opal. See, my guitars have custom bridge pins with brilliant blue opals on them because of my crazy brother. He’s kind of the King of Opals. That’s a whole story in itself. Opals and fossils and all things rock. So I called him and asked him if he wanted to make me a new one and it’s sitting on my kitchen counter right now waiting to be put on with the new strings for my guitar. 

Those buds are still sitting in my garage now. My ADHD and crazy RS President schedule kept me from that project. Even though I still have ADHD, I have been released as RS president, so maybe I’ll get to it this year!

Not only is George's house built of rock,
it's filled with rock.

For Christmas George gave each of us hand knitted buffalo hats. Hats made from the fur of the buffalo he raises in his front yard. I picture in my mind my brother walking out on his neuro-pathetic feet, gathering fur from his shedding bison. He finds a gal somewhere around there who cards the down (the soft fur on the bison) and spins it to yarn. Then he finds someone else who knits that homegrown buffalo yarn into warm and very hip hats. Mind you, there are seven siblings in our family, all of us still alive and kicking, and spouses, and children and such. Out of curiosity I Googled “Buffalo Yarn” and it turns out a skein of it would set you back between $70 and $130. One skein. Bison down goes for about $50 an ounce. Who knew? (George knew) And another thing, it is soft as cashmere. Who else do you know who has a bison hat?

My brother George's front yard. (3 bison this year)

Tonight, I am raising my eyes heavenward with a whisper of thanks to our Lord and to our mother, who did not get in the way of what the Lord might have had in mind for George Hansen, and Cori Hansen for that matter. I’m sorry for the messes we left in our wake. I’m sorry we have not outgrown the messes we still make. We sure appreciate the endless source of creative materials this earth affords us. Lord knows, we certainly are not bored down here.

Walter loves Uncle George's buffalo hat!