Subarus, knitting, colds and onions

November

Now what could all those things possibly have in common?

A Tuesday afternoon at the car dealership, naturally.

I was just reading Hema’s great post about the healing power of ginger and it reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a fellow mom as I waited on an oil change.

We were both in the service-area waiting room with our children, her daughter roughly the same age as my oldest. With the two girls happily playing in the toy-stocked alcove with the baby, we began to chat about this and that. The gorgeous sweater she was knitting, mostly, (How I wish I could do that!) and the fact my 2-year-old’s nose had not stopped running for seven straight days. I said I was beginning to worry about allergies, but she’d never shown any sensitivity before. Maybe it was just that time of year.

Then she offered a few things she does for her daughter’s colds, cribbed from old Polish family recipes. One, if I’m remembering correctly, involved boiling a raw onion in a little water and then sweetening the water-onion juice with a bit of sugar and spooning it into little mouths.

“It tastes sweet,” she said. “The kids love it.”

The other home cure had you dabbing Vicks VapoRub on the soles of their feet, then covering with socks for the night. Who would have thought?

My daughter’s cold finally ran it’s course on day nine or 10 with little more than my usual saline nose spray-suction-elevate-the head-of-her-crib method, but I couldn’t get the idea of onions out of my head.

As a kid, I remember my Dad would eat onions raw with gusto, biting into them like an apple. Great for your health, he would say. (Or maybe that’s what I think he might have said amid all of our cries of “Eww! Gross!”)

I Googled onions and colds and found a laundry list of cures involving onions — including my personal favorite for the sheer visual fun of it — putting a raw onion in a sock and wearing it around your neck at night. Which, incidentally, is also billed as a surefire cure for fevers and earaches.

I tried the raw onion cure myself a few weeks later, now myself stuffy and miserable, with a wicked sore throat. I chopped the onion and sweated it out with honey in a covered coffee cup. Then I gargled with apple cider vinegar and warm salt water every hour or so, another popular home remedy.

I felt perfectly fine 48 hours later and I’m always good for one bad cold every change of season.

So yesterday, when I noticed a little bit of, well, snot coming out of the 2-year-old’s nose I jumped into action — boiled an onion, cooled and sweetened the juice and mixed it in a sippy with ice and a little apple juice. She was none the wiser.

This morning?

Nose perfectly clear.

Hmmmm….

What’s your favorite home remedy? Anything from your grandparent’s day?

Photo by Ricky Flores — the onion was part of the sofrito he made for pasteles. Yum!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 11:13 am by Katie Ryan O'Connor.
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2 Responses to “Subarus, knitting, colds and onions”

Emily November 16th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
That’s amazing! I plan on definitely trying this during the winter!
Hunter March 5th, 2009 at 12:49 am
I usually don?t post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful ?

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