Poison Ivy

In third grade, I had the mumps, then measles and finally ran a low-grade fever for six weeks. Finally I physically was ready to go back to school

I wasn't worried about being behind. Work had been sent home for me to do. Dar, my grandmother, made sure it was done.

I didn't want to go back. First and second grade had been in a private school in West Virginia and I had already completed third grade work and part of fourth. Miss Berry was far nicer than Miss Blanche had been. Miss Blanche used a fear model of teaching that included a ruler being applied to the hands for wrong answers.

Because I was one of the smallest kids in third grade, my mother resisted any urge to put me in fourth. She felt I was better off with my peers socially.

Even if Miss Berry was nicer, having to give up cursive writing for printing on double lines, read things that I would have swallowed with little effort two years before was boring. Although I have never been good at math, I knew my times tables through 12 and wondered why I had to stop at the nines.

I decided I wouldn't go back.

We lived on 14 acres of land. I knew where there was a poison ivy patch. I rubbed its leaves all over my face.

It worked. The next day my face resembled a basketball.

Dr. Halligan, the family doctor who had been at my birth, was summoned. Yes, there were house calls in those days. If he had switched his fine woolen suit with a vest and pocket watch for green tights and shirt, people might have followed him to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Normally when he walked into a room, one felt better. This time his leprechaun magic didn't work. My face still itched terribly. There were blisters, the largest almost an inch long.

He prescribed a liquid to apply to each blister every two hours. My mother bought it immediately from Willis Drug Store. Soaking cotton balls with it, she began dabbing it on my face. Having a lighted candle burning my face would have felt better.

The bottle was gone by evening.

My mother called the doctor for a new prescription.

"How can it be gone? Did you dilute it one part solution to ten parts water?" he asked.

She hadn't. Within fifteen minutes Dr Halligan returned with a cortisone cream. "I am not sure there won't be permanent scaring," he said.

The cream was soothing, but the pain and itching lasted far too long. I eventually returned to school.

Although I only tan slightly, for the next few summers, the outline of each blister was on my face when ever the slightest hint of tan appeared. That there were no other markings, I was lucky.

I never confessed to my mother or my grandmother what I had done. I doubt if I would have been punished. Their sense of fairness would have decreed that the pain and itching combined with the fear of being scared would have been enough.

I never did it again.