Superstitions: A Tale of Origins

 My mother, Velma Dora Cochren Priest Terry, was, despite her faith, superstitious. Salt spilled was tossed over her shoulder, if her hand itched a certain way company was coming or money would pass into her hand, and on the list went. In her first marriage she had moved to an area rich with its own deep and sometimes unique customs.

I asked her one day why she had these sayings and actions. She told me this story and I share it as best I can just as she told it to me.

"When I was first married I was, as they say, "young and dumb".  My husband's family in the Ozarks of Barry Co., Missouri were seeped in a lot of dire warnings, signs, and superstitions. There were healers in the woods and women with potions. As I said, I was young and dumb but enough things seemed to happen to almost make me think there was something to it all.

Then, my baby girl, Doris Arlene got sick one winter.  A fever, a cold, and it just got worse. The house was cold, the winter harsh and she just kept getting worse. My mother-in-law and other women were visiting one day and a sound on the roof drew all our eyes upwards to the stained ceiling. 

It sounded as if someone had dropped a handful of rocks or pebbles and they were rolling off over and down the sloped roof.

"That's not good." Said one old woman in the rocking chair. She was staring up with a strange look on her face. The other murmured agreements.

"What?" I had to know because they were scaring me.

"Acorns on the roof like that, well, that means somebody in the house is gonna die."

Doris Arlene Priest
1934-1935 (8 mon.)

I glanced at where my baby was sitting, struggling to breathe, on the lap of her grandmother and had the most awful premonition come over me.

It was later, in the deep and cold of the night, my little girl took her last, heartrending, breath.

So, every since then, well, I don't know as I believe all those superstitions they did but - just in case."

 [As told to her daughter, Marilyn A. Terry Hudson]

As the photos help illustrate my mother was a very young mother, she had eloped when she was 15 saying she was 18. Her first child (shown in the photo booth image above when he was 4 with his mother) was born in 1931, her second daughter Leona was born and died in 1933 when her mother was 16, and when Doris died she was only 19.

Life gives to us many lessons, habits become buried and rooted deeply into and across generations. So, do you have any lingering superstitions gained from a previous generation? 

Ask an elder now, before the story is forever lost, of  how they first learned of that custom or began to act out that particle behavior. Sometimes, like the old saw about the roast and cutting off the end before it went into the pan, are mindless repetitions. For those who never heard that adage, each generation of women cooked their pot roast by first slicing off the end of the roast before putting it in the pan and placing it in the oven. Finally, a great-granddaughter goes to the source to ask why. The response was simple: her pan had been too small for the whole roast to fit into it so she cut off the end.

A young, naïve, and inexperienced young girl, plunged into a new world amid strangers with new customs and beliefs was greatly influenced by those fears, those customs, and those traditions.  I remember that every time the salt spills...

Yes, over the shoulder it goes - just in case.