My mother, the time machine---
Strange title, right. My old mom is 88 years old, and I call her a couple of times a week (she is in a town where I grew up, about 200 Km away from where I live), in a senior citizens apartment. I talked to her yesterday, and told her that I am suffering from a terrible chest cold. This is not a small thing, because I am allergic to any and all antibiotics. My mother began reminiscing about when I was a small child in the 1940's, and the accepted "cure" for things at the time. She was talking about putting mustard plasters on my chest to break up the heavy phlegm of a chest cold, (I remember that) and about putting choppped up onions in my socks and making me wear the socks to bed to "draw the cold" (and I don't remember that). She was talking about putting a few drops of camphorated oil on a wool sock and pinning it around my neck to help me breath.---I do remember very old men at the time, who wore a block of camphor in a wool sock around their neck all winter long, to "ward off the cold".---I remember, you could smell them old buggers from a hundred yards down wind!!! Where is this big ramble taking us??? Well, nowhere really, except that there are probably a few men my age on this forum, with similar memories of another time. I grew up in VERY back woods Ontario, with no electricity. My father was a lumber jack, as were my uncles and my ancient grandfather. I remember my mother telling me about one winter when she was a child, and her and 5 siblings were living on the shore of one of the big lakes in that region of Ontario, with my grandmother. This would have been in the mid 1920's. My grandfather was away working in a logging camp. There was a terrible storm going on, and my uncle Percy went out to the shed to milk the cow by lantern light. Something frightened the cow, and it kicked him in the face, breaking his nose very badly, and giving him a terrible nose bleed. He was bleeding so badly that my grandmother thought he would bleed to death, and with no neighbours to call on, and no telphone to call for help, my grandmother put on a pair of snowshoes and, leaving the oldest girl (my mother) in charge of the other children, she walked down the lake in the middle of a blizzard to an abandoned trappers cabin. She took a brown paper bag with her and gathered up all the spiderwebs from the old cabin, then walked back up the lake, a distance of 3 miles one way, in a damned blizzard yet, and used the cobwebs to stop the bleeding. It must have worked fairly well, because my uncle Percy passed away 3 years ago, well up into his eighties. Sometimes in this age of internet, 911, medivac choppers, cellphones, and wall to wall people, we forget that there are still people alive today that truly did live in another world.---Brian
