I went to the dermatologist last week to have several growths taken off my head. She called them a protuberance, but that’s just a fancy name for warts. I told my doctor that I used to have an uncle who could rub over and blow on a wart, and it would disappear. She suspiciously looked at me over the top of her glasses. I was told this all my life by my mother as it was her Uncle Otis who had this unusual gift.
I remember reading the book “Tom Sawyer,” and in one of the stories where Huckleberry Finn was going to a cemetery at midnight with a dead cat to perform a witch’s ritual to cure warts. I have, through my lifetime heard of several ways to get rid of warts. I’ve heard that rubbing a wart with half a cut potato then bury it under a tree, wake up early and wash the wart in the morning dew, rub chicken bones on the warts at night, you can buy a wart by rubbing copper pennies on them, and of course the seventh son of a family could remove a wart.
Needless to say, I didn’t try any of these “scientific” ways to get rid of mine. I did try to scratch them off several times and thought I might bleed to death. I went with the tried-and-true way — dermatology.
For some reason some people have a propensity for these aggravating little nodules. Cancer took my daddy several years ago; it was one they could never locate the starting place, and he had so many of these little lumps and bumps on him and they kept checking them but none was the cause of his disease. Mine have all been no cause for worry, just frustration. I am told that some families have something in their genetic make-up that causes these, and all the Prices have had problems with little growths. I guess we are one of the families.
I have a friend who found love at a later age, and she has always said that her new sweetheart loved her, warts and all. She does not mean actual warts but her eccentricities. She does not have a single one of these nuisances.
Warts, some are like mine, some are like everybody, unseen. I’ve heard people say, “I hide my warts,” meaning that they have idiosyncrasies they keep private. I started thinking about my warts, my private warts, and the only thing I can deduce is that I hide, or try to hide sometimes without much success, is my need to give unsolicited advice. At my age I seem to believe, probably only to myself, that I am very wise but most of my family just somehow looks over this quality of mine.
I am going to give you a different kind of recipe this week. We have so many little beetles, everywhere! My little Emmie calls them ladybugs, but they are aggravating. Here’s how I get rid of them:
2 cups of warm water
4 tablespoons sugar
4 squirts of Dawn dish liquid
Put in a pint Mason jar, and set on cabinet. They seem to love this and fall right in.
