It’s flu season and I can’t help
but to think of the many spells, concoctions, remedies (tortures) that my
mother and grandmother subjected my cousins, siblings, and me to as we were
growing up. Anything from a cough to the flu, a spider bite to a wasp sting to
a case of head lice was readily cured by something that my grandmother believed
would help.
Many of these home-made cures were staples of the medicine cabinet and they
doubled for multiple purposes. I hated to even mention that I felt anything
less than the utmost of health and vitality. At the mere whisper that my
stomach was upset, Grandma would serve me up a sweet but hideous looking glass
of prune juice. It looked like the swill at the bottom of a tobacco chewer’s
spit cup, and I must say that as a child, I thought it tasted that way too. The
prune juice was meant as a stool softener; I guess it worked . . . eventually.
If the prune juice didn’t quench grandma’s taste for inflicting torture, the
Castor oil did; the oil, a taste I will never, ever, forget was like the
oldest, biggest, and meanest brother of stool softeners/laxatives . . . it works
beautifully.
Another surefire way to cure an
ailment was with Vick’s Vapor Rub. Even if you tried to hide it, grandma could
tell by your voice that you had a cold. The white container with a blue lid in
her hand, she sat on the edge of the bed and had you sit up. I admit that it
was nice and soothing when she would rub some on my chest and under my nose; it
made my eyes water a little, but I actually could breathe a little better.
However, was it really necessary, Grandma, to make me eat a finger full of this
greasy salve? It coated my teeth as I choked it down making it impossible to
sleep, for I then had to incessantly swallow for fifteen minutes straight
trying to vacate my mouth of that impossible and detestable coating.
Sometimes I felt as if Grandma and
my mother sat at the window waiting for one of us to fall down. Why else would
they even consider putting what I considered battery acid on our cuts and
scrapes? Walking in the house with a scraped knee, she would grab a bottle of
mercurochrome or iodine and swab it into the open wound. Oh my God, how it
burned. Back then I was sure that it would burn completely through my leg, “It
burns Grandma!” any one of us would say as she fanned the burning with a
magazine. “It’s ok. We used this stuff when I was a little girl and it healed
right up,” she would say. I still cannot believe that they endured the same
pain and in turn passed it on to their kids and grandchildren. I know, because
they always told me, that people were tougher back then, but give me a break.
It seems borderline insane. Now, how about the holidays?
Just like all kids, my cousins,
siblings, and I loved Easter, Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s and all the
sweet sugary goodies that our parents allowed us to stuff in our mouths. In the
same way that kids think about the now and not the near future when they stand
in place and spin in circles, we gorged and gobbled all the sweets we got our
hands on. Mom, because of Grandma’s warning, worried about the worms that
Grandma assured her would infest us from eating too much candy. A spoonful of
sugar helps the medicine go down?—baloney! A spoonful of sugar masked the
disgusting taste of turpentine like a smile masks a hungry shark. They actually
had us eat a spoonful of sugar with a few drops of turpentine in it, and yes,
it tastes exactly the how it smells.
Bug bites: I was gathering eggs for
my Great Uncle Virgil when I was a teenager. Somewhere in the process I was
bitten by a spider. A knot the size of a silver-dollar raised on my arm. Upon
showing my uncle (who smoked a pipe), he put a big chaw of the pipe tobacco in
his mouth and after it was real good and real slobbery, he splatted it onto my
arm and wrapped a kerchief around it. I remember watching his spit seep out
from underneath the cloth and drip off my arm—yuck!
Anyhow, I survived the stomach
aches; the stopped up noses eventually cleared up; my knee did heal; I am
never, and probably never will be, malnourished or wormy, and my arm never fell
off from the spider bite. So that being said, maybe it worked?
