Chasing Thistledown

By Mrs. A. J. Wilder. Mansfield, Missouri

Did you ever chase thistledown? Oh, of course, when you were a child, but I mean since you have been grown! Some of us should be chasing thistledown a good share of the time.

There is an old story, for the truth of which I cannot vouch, which is so good I am going to take the risk of telling it and if any of you have heard it before it will do no harm to recall it to your minds. A woman once confessed to the priest that she had been gossiping. To her surprise, the priest instructed her to go gather a ripe head of the thistle and scatter the seed on the wind, then to return to him. This she did wondering why she had been told to do so strange a thing, but her penance was only begun, for when she returned to the priest, instead of forgiving her fault, he said: "The thistledown is scattered as were your idle words. My daughter, go and gather up the thistledown!"

It is so easy to be careless and one is so prone to be thoughtless in talking. I told only half of a story the other day heedlessly overlooking the fact that by telling only a part, I left the listeners with a wrong impression of some very kindly persons. Fortunately I saw in time what I had done and I pounced on that thistledown before the wind caught it or else I should have had a chase.

A newcomer in the neighborhood says, "I do like Mrs. Smith! She seems such a fine woman."

 "Well, y-e-s," we reply, "I've known her a long time," and we leave the new acquaintance wondering what it is we know against Mrs. Smith. We have said nothing against her but we have "dammed with faint praise" and a thistle seed is sown on the wind.

The noun "Gossip" is not of the feminine gender. No absolutely not! A man once complained to me of some things that had been said about his wife. "Damn these gossiping women!" he exclaimed. "They do nothing but talk about their neighbors who are better than they. Mrs. Cook spends her time running around gossiping when she should be taking care of her children. Poor things, they never have enough to eat, by their looks. Her housework is never done and as for her character everybody knows about—" and he launched into a detailed account of an occurrence which certainly sounded very compromising as he told it. I repeated to myself his first remark with the word men in place of the word "women" just to see how it would sound.

And so we say harmful things carelessly; we say unkind things in a spirit of retaliation or in a measure of self-defense to prove that we are no worse than others and the breeze of idle chatter, from many tongues, picks them up, blows them here and there and scatters them to the four corners of the earth. What a crop of thistles they raise! If we were obliged to go gather up the seed before it had time to grow as the woman in the story was told to do, I am afraid we would be even busier than we are.

Mrs. A. J. Wilder. "Chasing Thistledown." Missouri Ruralist,  (June 20, 1917): page 12.

CLICK HERE to return to the list of articles from the Missouri Ruralist.