Gonna Need an Ocean

One summer when I was at the beach, I found myself driving down unknown roads in the middle of the night to find a medical clinic in a nearby town to help me with a major medical crisis. Turning here, turning there, studying the map as I drove, I finally spotted the location I had found through a telephone book. Inside, I threw myself at the mercy of the doctors and nurses. Thankfully, they did not throw up their hands and run screaming in the opposite direction when they saw my face. The Hippocratic Oath does guarantee a certain decorum.

After a consultation, they recommended a shot of cortisone, which I took, despite my vow after a similar shot in my wrist years earlier never to take cortisone again. Sometimes it’s just hard to make myself stick with my belief in natural medicine, especially when my face is covered with burning, oozing pustules that remind me just how stupid I am sometimes to neglect my health by venturing near the worst toxin I can imagine any time of year: poison ivy. Sometimes you’ll do anything for the pain.

Right now as I pen this lament, I am under the influence of 1/18th of a high-falutin antihistamine, enough to take the edge off the interminable itching but not enough to put me completely to sleep. I am thankful that my fingers are not swollen and oozing like my ankles, and that’s because I now have enough sense to wash my hands thoroughly with Tecnu or Bert’s Bees Poison Ivy Soap after I’ve been near the woods, or even my garden. In fact, truth be told, I usually shower for twenty minutes with the stuff after I’ve walked through the yard this time of year. If I even see a poison ivy leaf, I’m inclined to imbibe some homeopathic poison ivy concoction to ward off “itching, burning and crusting skin due to exposure to poison ivy or oak.”

I don’t know what I was thinking that afternoon I decided to scavenge potatoes. I guess I was just wooed into a false sense of security by the glimpse of a few tomatoes near my languishing potato patch. With all the rain we’ve had, the green tops rotted off of the potatoes, which made looking for them sort of fun, even if I did have to walk through brambles and brush away the new growth of weeds replacing the rotten potato tops. In shorts, in flip-flops, I was hardly attired to take on Mother Nature in a bad mood. Picking the tomatoes, I just had to see if I could find some potatoes. And I was so excited to dig the potatoes, I forgot to shower and began boiling water instead (after I washed my hands).

They tasted great. I’m not sure they’re worth the agony I’m going through right now, though. A pint of blackberries might be, or a banana pepper that decided that my yard was worth growing in, but not four little potatoes that weren’t nearly as tasty as the ones I can get from the Flaccaventos at the Abingdon Farmers’ Market. Come to think of it, I bet farmers’ markets were invented for people like me who (a) don’t have a lot of luck with vegetables and (b) don’t really want to suffer unmercifully trying to grow them.

I think I will get my son to pick the rest of my vegetables this year. It’s the least he can do for his mom and her hyperallergenia, especially if he wants her to be poison-ivy free in time for the beach.

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 14 July 2004, p. A6. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2004.