“You look like you could use a Good Cleaning Out.”
My Grandma DeVane looked at me with appraising eyes, seeing through muscle,
connective tissue, and blood, straight to my guts. How did she do that? Must’ve
been with the same “eyes in the back of her head” she called to action when I
misbehaved out of her direct line of vision. Mama had the same talent.
A Good Cleaning Out entailed a supersized serving
spoon of something slick and vile, in Grandma DeVane’s case, mineral oil.
Others in my age group, and from the Deep South, have reported similar
experiences, but with castor oil. Heaven help that any of our generation lived
past twenty, what with drinking from the water hose, riding in the back of
speeding pick-ups without safety restraints, and biking without helmets.
The cure for a bad cough was a drop of kerosene on a
sugar cube. But that’s another story. No small wonder I would not have been the
best choice as a taste-tester after the BP Gulf oil spill. My body’s acclimated
to petroleum products. Shrimp and Grits with pure sweet crude might bring misty
reminiscences of Grandma’s home remedies.
Strange, I recall feeling better after the Good
Cleaning Out. Purified. Near holy. Crapping like a crippled goose had to bring
some rewards.
Cleaning out “stuff” brings the same sense of ahhhh with less intestinal agony.
Closets, the garage, my piles of writing tablets and author flotsam. Amazing
how purging my work space will often summon the muses. They don’t abide
clutter. It makes them pack their little literary duffle bags and check out.
Nature abhors a vacuum. As soon as a clean space
announces itself, paper, books and stuff rush to fill it. The cycle renews.
But for one second, I sense the importance of a Good
Cleaning Out.
Thanks, Grandma.
Rhett DeVane
Fiction with a Southern Twist
