My mother grew up in the middle of the Great Depression in a place called Ava, Missouri, a small farming community where money was scarce, and the highlight of the week was riding a horse-drawn wagon into town to purchase five loaves of store-bought white bread for twenty-five cents. And the very last thing her parents would waste their hard-earned money on was a visit to a doctor, so when she and her brother and sister got sick, her mother (my Granny) turned to a fascinating assortment of home remedies.
For instance, if you had a sore throat, Granny would heat up some turpentine and Vicks and generously apply it all over your neck. Then she would tightly wrap a thick, fatty slice of bacon around that concoction, followed by a wide strip of heavy flannel to keep everything in place. Then smelling to high heaven, my poor mother would then be marched off to school with the warning that she would be in big trouble if she took it off before she got home.
If, God forbid, you should develop a bad cough, Granny would mix some sugar in a teaspoon of water and then very carefully add three drops of kerosene to it. This deadly mixture had to be gulped down while you held your breath because the fumes could actually choke you if you weren’t careful.
If you had a cut or any skin disorder, then Dr. Saymon’s foul-smelling salve was quickly applied to the problem area. And Dr. Sloan’s liniment (which my mother said actually smelled like the same thing the local vets used on horses) was used for rheumatism and other lower back problems. One had to take extra care, though, to make sure this particular substance never touched any body openings. Family lore has it that Granny was once using this awful stuff on my father when he was a young man and some of it accidentally slipped down into the crack of his exposed backside. I’m told his screams could be heard all the way into the next county.
Granny also firmly believed that if you just didn’t feel up to par, but couldn’t quite put your finger on the problem, then you needed a laxative. “Give him a dose of salts!” was the way she always put it, which meant a glass or so of liquid Epsom salts, which definitely cleaned out your entire system. And in a hurry, too!
If you had an upset stomach, then Granny would immediately boil up a pot of sassafras roots and make you a cup of hot sassafras tea. Actually, this was one of Granny’s few home remedies which didn’t taste or smell like death itself.
Different kinds of greases were also real popular with Granny. She used goose grease for just about everything, but my mom tells me bacon grease was her favorite for mosquito, tick, and chigger bites. What in the world is a chigger by the way?
Another one of Granny’s favorites was the infamous mustard plaster, and unfortunately, this little beauty became one of my mother’s most beloved home remedies, too. It was supposed to help cure a chest cold and what my mother would do is mix up a bunch of dry mustard with some warm water. This goop was then liberally spread out all over my young chest, and within minutes, my whole torso felt like you could roast marshmallows over it.
Anyway, when I was growing up, my mother still believed in quite a few of Granny’s old home remedies, and to this day she is eager to rub Ben Gay (I hate that smell!) or Frankie Avalon’s Zero Pain ointment on her grandchildren if she thinks they need it. She also keeps a bottle of Vicks at the ready, which quickly brings back memories of childhood suffocation the moment I smell it. You see, when I was young, every time I got a stuffy nose, a generous amount of that god-awful stuff would be shoved up both my nostrils. The belief, as I understood it at the time, was that the vapor would make it easier to breathe. In reality, the little air I could get through my nose in the first place was immediately cut off by the globs of Vicks.
But after doctors mercifully arrived on the scene with penicillin and other such miracle medical treatments, my mother eased up a little on Granny’s old home remedies, and one by one, they began to disappear. I was kidding her the other day about this when she suddenly said with conviction, “You know, young man, there’s just one little thing you’re forgetting.”
“What’s that, Mom?” I asked like a good son.
“That thanks to all those home remedies, you were always healthy as a horse!”