Categories: uncategorized
Date: 24 July 2006 03:19:26
We all want our Mommy from time to time... well, everyone but me.
When I'm sick I remember what Mama did the time she thought I had the mumps.
In the little wooden rent house where I grew up -- raised on concrete pilings up off the ground, as all good old South Louisiana houses are -- the bathroom was a later addition.
The original owners must have had quite a nice outhouse, out back. The concrete well-like base left behind where it used to stand seemed substantial to me. But, by the time my family came along, there was of course a nice bathroom, with a perfectly good toilet and an old-fashioned iron-and-porcelain claw-footed bathtub. So, no interesting outhouse filled with opportunities to encounter spiders and snakes and frogs. Dang it.
Just a house-wide back porch, a windowed-in "gallery", with the bath down at the end of it. The big black wall-mounted telephone, with its super-long curly cord, was on the opposite side of the porch from the bathroom, parked between the back door to the back yard and the inner door to the kicthen.
So, there I am one day, just a little girl, feeling rotten, trying to use the toilet in peace.
Meanwhile Mama is on the phone with her mother, Granny Green. Who is, besides a grandmother, also a nurse. In a psychiatric institution, but still, a nurse! So, when the kids got sick, you know who Mama called.
Granny told her to make me eat a pickle. She figured, if it was really mumps, I'd not react well at all to that sour pickle.
So onward came the Pickle Posse. Mama marched down that long back porch and through the open bathroom door, Granny's admonition ringing in her ears, waving a pickle at me, trailing behind her my middle sister, my baby sister, and about 50 feet of coiling writhing black phone cord.
Sheesh. Can't a little girl use the potty in peace?
Now that I'm grown, I don't usually get that "I want my Mommy" feeling, being sick. The first thing that pops into my memory is my little Mama, brandishing that pickle, coming through the bathroom doorway.
So now I'm more a "Go away and let me die in peace" person. Bring me some soup and go on about your business.
And no pickles.