A few weeks back I wrote a little piece about my late mother is home remedies. There were one or two more which I forgot to mention and have since recalled. My mother used to have a unique way to fend off germs. Not just some germs but all germs. She did it with what she called an asafetida bag. I wore one for three years from the time I started grade one until grade three. Mother made these bags by tearing up a small piece of cloth into about 6 inch squares. In the center of the square she put a cube of camphor and a clove of garlic. Then she’d gather up the four corners of the cloth, wrap a spring around the gather and tie it to my neck under my heavy drop-seat Stanfields underwear. I tell you, in a hot classroom you can smell young Forbes 50 feet away. As soon as the smell started to weaken mother would put together another asafetida bag and we'd have a fresh go at those germs. Funny thing about it is this. My mother, when I was a kid, didn't believe in shots. I never had a needle in my arm until I joined the Royal Canadian Navy. All my other friends were inoculated and vaccinated for everything from hangnails to bog spaven, but my brother and I went unprotected except for mothers asafetida bags. The miracle of the matter is that while other kids, protected as they were by the advances of modern medicine, were dropping like flies with measles, mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough, my brother and I never got a thing. We had to be the healthiest kids in school. Naturally I would like to attribute this to mothers asafetida bags. No one should have to suffer as we did without some benefit, but in the quiet turning of my own considered judgment, I can see now why my brother and I never caught all those childhood diseases. Very simply, no diseased kids; in fact no healthy one either would get within 20 feet of us. The asafetida bags were just too much to take. Just one thing more. Those bags gave me a nickname which I carried with me for 25 years. They called me….. stinky.
No comments:
Post a Comment