Personally, I don't have many, if any, superstitious fears or foibles. But I grew up with a father who had quite a few (including the two mentioned in the Motherlode post). My Dad used to say he got them from his grandmother, but if you ask my great-aunt Dee, she would say, "my mother never said any thing like that!"
One of the rules Dad clung to through the years was the idea that planting coriander, a staple ingredient in Indian cuisine and therefore something my mother would have very much liked to have in her garden, was bad luck. Well, not even bad luck so much as if you grew it, you would leave your house and move. Which is ironic, because in all my years of growing up, we never grew coriander, and we never stayed in one place more than six years! Wonder how much we would have moved if we HAD grown it!
If we had, we would not have been able to trim the plants at night. Also, we couldn't cut our nails at night. Both bad luck. And I just learned about this one: Dad did not like a collection of seashells in the house.
I have to say, he might have been on to something because I do consider myself an incredibly lucky person and was certainly blessed to be raised in the family I was. So who am I to poo-poo these little rules and regulations? On the big stuff, the stuff that mattered, Mum and Dad were always very reasonable and liberal. So what if I had to sleep with sapphire earrings under my pillow before I was allowed to wear them? Not that big of a hardship, really! No bad dreams, brand new earrings!
My husband has his own set of superstitions, which have now become mine my default. We're careful not to leave shoes on a chair, don't walk under ladders or open umbrellas indoors and avoid having black cats cross our paths whenever possible. Last year we had little choice but to fly on Friday the 13th and, luckily, we had a safe and pleasant voyage. But maybe that's because I had my fingers crossed the whole way.
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