THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 5, 1994 TAG: 9407010114
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
TAKE A RAW potato, my mother-in-law said, and rub it on your son's warts. Bury it in the ground and when it rots, the warts will fall off.
She looked at me serenely. I looked at her skeptically. I'm just telling you what I heard, she said.
I hear the most amazing things when I visit my second family in West Virginia. My own relatives are scattered through several states, and we tend to ignore each other. My husband's family, on the other hand, lives within a 10-mile circle in the mountains, and they tend to share each other's living space.
My second family is a lot more fun than my own. But keeping up with the conversation can be a bit bewildering, because they run on a first-name basis with family members, neighbors, ex-family members, local politicians, soap opera characters and country-western singers. Most sentences start with ``I heard. . . ''
There was a chatty group of 11 sitting on the porch one evening at Pap's house, down in the ``holler.'' Pap wasn't there. He's dead, but it's still his house. His bachelor sons live there, with one spinster sister and one widowed sister, in a house with a hand water pump and a coal-burning stove. The sisters retired from West Virginia University. The brothers farm.
I loitered in the dusty road with the sisters, watching my city-bred children splash rocks in the ``crick'' to scare the fish and peek in the outhouse. My 6-year-old son went in to use it. My daughter, 3, tried to lock him inside. I don't know how she knew that old hillbilly trick. She didn't hear it from me.
The porch was already crowded when a pickup truck pulled up, and three people leaped out. There's Lena, a sister said. I wondered who Lena was, but it wasn't important enough to ask. Lena and the two men settled in on the porch swing for a couple hours.
On the way back to town, my husband asked, ``Who's Lena?''
``You know,'' his mother answered. ``She's the one ran off with your uncle Guy.''
``Guy is married to Mary Dell,'' he said.
``He was then, too,'' his mother answered.
``Who were the two men?'' he asked.
``That's her son and her husband.''
``Which one's the son, the one with the bad teeth or the one with the hair?''
His mother looked at him, shock on her face. ``Couldn't you tell?'' she asked. ``He looks like Guy.''
``Is he Guy's son?''
``Not supposed to be. I'm just telling you what I heard.''
Back at the house, we listened to the Hank Williams tribute on The Nashville Network, and I listened to my mother-in-law's monologue on the fast ways of a number of young women. Some of them were family. Some wanted to be. I had trouble sorting them out. I finally thought I had nailed down one identity and asked a tentative question to test my theory. ``What does Paula think of Nathan getting the goat?''
I evidently hadn't heard correctly. Paula didn't care about the goat.
So now that I'm back home, I'm wondering whether my ears correctly caught this potato-wart remedy.
I don't remember mention of how deep to bury it, or how to know when it rots, short of digging it up again, or whether digging it up to check on rottenness will ruin the cure.
I don't know whether the moon phase matters. I don't know of any personal testimonials about its worth. I'm just telling you what I heard. by CNB