Back in the 50’s, when my mom was growing up in Seagoville, our country cousin across the Trinity River, and before her family’s move to N Kaufman Street – when they still lived in the old frame house on Watson, the one that’s now the site of a church, she contracted Epidemic Parotitus, the Mumps. My grandmother was absolutely beside herself. Mumps killed off 400-500 children a year in its pre-vax heyday, back when the country wasn’t as densely populated as it is today. My mom has a few select memories from this time. She remembers a scarf around her face that ran under her chin and was tied tightly above her forehead. She recalls a parade of wannabe doctor aunts and suggestions of all sorts of poultices and homemade compounds designed to “draw the poison from the child’s face”. This was one of Mom’s back pocket stories when I was young. When she would tell it to me, I would inevitably imagine the witch’s council from the TV show Bewitched. Six year old me wondered if Aunt Floye was the same as Aunt Clara, or who was the Endora of the group, Aunt Opal or Aunt Jewel? Did the doctor in her story, the one who made the house calls & administered the eye of newt, look like Dr. Bombay? High school me, with my newfound love of the classics, saw the aunts as the 3 sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It was kind of spooky, any way you cut it. Spoiler alert, Mom survived with her hearing intact. Crisis averted.
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