Remembering an Old Cure

This past weekend it really warmed up.  It was the very end of January and the temperatures were in the 70's.  Crazy, I tell you!  I stepped outside the door to our house and the colony of honeybees that live in our column were buzzing out of the entrance to the hive, seeking flowers.  For a while now, they've been dormant, but the warmer temperatures enticed them to go out and eat.  It was good to see the bees again.

Even though they fly around, we've never been stung in the 3 years that we have shared our dwelling with the honeybees.  Friendly bees, I presume.  For some reason I began to try to recollect the last time I was stung and I dredged up out of my memory a time as a boy that some wasps tore me up. My grandfather called them guinea wasps.  They were small, but don't let the size fool you, they were angry, aggressive and made me cry like a baby.

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At our farm in Oberlin we had what we called the combine shed.  The combine shed was a big pole barn, tall enough to park the combine under.  The barn created a lot of shade and as a result, it was cool underneath there - a perfect place to sit on a hot, sultry, steamy South Louisiana afternoon.  My brother and I found ourselves there and were climbing up the ladder to the combine - an old John Deere that looked something like the one below:

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I was halfway up the ladder that you see above when it felt like my legs were on fire. Before I could jump off the ladder, I was encircled by angry wasps who turned my leg into a punching bag, repeatedly stinging me and making tears flow from my eyes like the floodgates on a dam.  I ran back to the camp where the adults were and explained what ailed me between sobs, intermingled with rivers of snot and tears.

Thank the Good Lord for Joe.  Joe worked for my Dad and Grandpa for many years. What a guy! Joe's vice was chewing tobacco.  Cussing was another.  He could cuss a blue streak, but that's not relevant to the story.  Joe didn't have a favorite brand of tobacco.  He had two favorite brands of tobacco and he would mix them before chewing it.  From his pocket he would pull out a pouch of Five Brothers Pipe Smoking Tobacco:

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And then he would pull out a package of Levi Garrett:

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He would mix up both of the tobaccos and place a huge wad of it in his cheek.  The funny thing is, we almost never saw him spit.

Well, Joe was sitting on the porch of the camp as I came running up, wailing, and he told me to calm down.  He had just the remedy to cure the sting.  Forget Benadryl!  That's for city folk.  He had something better.  He promptly pulled a big, wet, slimy, soggy, brown wad of chewing tobacco from his cheek that he had been chewing on and he pressed it on my already swollen calf.  I looked on in horror as the warm, brown juice ran down my leg, staining my white tube socks.  I'm not sure how this old remedy works, but supposedly, tobacco has a highly basic composition and it counteracts the acidic nature of a sting. All I know is that it worked.  A good herbal remedy, for sure.

In about five minutes the stinging sensation ended and all the pain disappeared. The swelling went down, the tears dried up and all was right again in the world. Except for the guinea wasps.  But old Joe had a remedy for them, too.  I walked to the shop with him and he pulled out his pocketknife and cut the top off of a Dr. Pepper can.  He then filled it half full of gasoline and we walked back to the scene of the crime underneath the combine shed.  The guinea wasps had settled down by then and were back on the nest. With precision rivaled only by maybe Nolan Ryan, Joe threw a perfect strike, tossing the gasoline so that it saturated the nest, killing all of the wasps.  We looked at the "frozen" wasps lying underneath the ladder to the old combine and Joe gave them a good cussing.  Then we walked back to the camp. Sitting down, Joe pulled out his pouch of Five Brothers and Levi Garrett and began mixing up another batch of chew.  In the event anyone else got stung, of course.