TOUGH LOVE

I was just a little shaver the day I cut my foot with the ax. I laid a gash wide open between my right big toe and the one next to it!

The cut was fairly deep and my Mother thought it needed stitching so she boiled her curved needle and some cotton thread. I bit my tongue and held my ankle while she closed that gash as pretty as you please. My mother was real good at this sort of thing and she had done a real good job cleaning the wound. She even poured it full of Dr. LeGears sheep dip! She claimed the sheep dip would help it heal.

In a day or so it had festered up and there was a red streak running all the way up, past my ankle. My whole foot was swollen and was as red as a beet. My Mother got real worried and sent my brother Tob to fetch my Grandmother.

Grandmother was the nearest thing to a doctor we had in this remote region of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She delivered most of the babies and doctored most of the sick people. She was part Cherokee and had learned her medicinal skills from her Indian ancestors.

My Grandmother took one look at my foot and started into scolding my Mother. She lifted the eye from the top of the cook stove, pulled a pocketknife from her apron pocket and stuck the blade into the flames.

With the knife in her right hand and while holding my foot with the left hand she directed my Mother to hold me around the arms. In one swipe Grandma slit that wound wide open! Pus and corruption oozed out and ran down onto the rag in her lap where my foot was resting. I can feel the relief to this day!

Grandma placed my foot in the chair and let it drain while she paced the kitchen floor. She would pace back and forth, stopping just long enough to look out the window to the pasture below the house.

Suddenly, Grandma picked me up in her arms and carried me down the hill to the pasture.

She stood me on my feet beside a hot steamy pile of fresh cow manure.

"Put your foot in there!" she commanded as she tapped my right leg.

I didn’t hesitate. I popped my hot, throbbing, pus dripping foot into that pile of cow manure all the way up to my ankle.

"Now stand there until I tell you to get out" she again commanded.

I stood there! Nobody! And I do mean nobody, disobeyed Grandma.

It was real hot that day and about three hours later, the longest three hours of my life Grandma came back. She took me by the arm and marched me over to the creek bank and washed my foot in the cold mountain stream. She didn’t say a word, just patted me on the rear end and I ran all the way back to the house. Within a week my foot was completely healed.

My Mother and Grandmother were the personification of a thing called though love!

It is hard for a boy
To get much joy
When he is so very young.
And to have the will
To stand real still
With his foot
In hot cow dung!