Calendula

Dear reader, meet Clara the herbwoman: She's the midwife and healer in a rustic little village in the midst of miles and miles of nothing but fields and forests.

Winter is drawing to a close, but it's still cold out, and the farmers are starting to ready their tools for the coming planting season. The farmers' hands are roughened by the cold weather, and their skin is starting to chafe and split, even as those hands are needed to do fiddly repairs on tools or to sew new clothes for the coming spring.

Many a farmer will call on Clara to find a salve to soothe the skin, to enable those much-abused hands to do the necessary chores. Thus, today we find Clara stirring herbs into her cauldron, to cook up the salve the farmers will need. Let's watch over her shoulder while she assembles her ingredients on her wooden kitchen table:

• Several bunches of fresh-cut basil, harvested from one of the pots Clara keeps on her window sill all winter.
• A jar of calendula oil she's prepared by macerating calendula flower petals in sunflower oil, which she's let steep on a shelf by the oven for the last six weeks.
• Clarified butter that she's rendered from the fresh butter one of her patients has bartered for her services last week.
• Beeswax from her own beehive out in the kitchen garden.