I walked into Marlene’s mudroom on Monday and the entire bench was lined up with wool socks, each one packed with half a yellow onion, toe-end down. She had the kettle going and a printout of the new WHO respiratory guidance on the counter with a coffee ring through the part about ventilation. “I read it twice,” she said. “They want us masking. We’re onioning.”
I love her for many reasons and this is one of them.
For people who haven’t seen it yet, the World Health Organization issued an updated advisory this week about the seasonal respiratory surge, and it is exactly the kind of document you’d expect from a building with that many fluorescent lights. Masks in clinics. Boosters for the elderly. Stay home if you’re sick. Wash your hands like you’ve just touched a doorknob in an airport, which apparently is the worst thing a hand can do.
I’m not saying any of it is wrong. I’m saying my body already knows.
My sister-in-law Tasha, who works the front desk at a pediatric urgent care in Weaverville and has therefore seen more thermometers than most actual nurses, told me on Sunday that this particular variant is “more of a sinus thing, like a detox the lymph wants anyway.” She said you can tell because it moves through families in three days flat and leaves everyone slightly taller-feeling. I wrote that down. I am aware how that sounds. I wrote it down anyway.
The Facebook group I’ve been in since October — it’s called “Lungs Were Made For Air (Not Polypropylene)” and the admin is a former dental hygienist in Boise — had the WHO release dissected by 6 a.m. with a color-coded PDF. The top comment, with 1,400 reactions, was just the word “mullein,” and honestly that’s where I am too. Mullein tea, bone broth with a whole peeled garlic floating in it like a little submarine, and a hot onion compress on the chest at bedtime. That’s the protocol. That has been the protocol in this house for the entire Obama administration onward and we have not once been hospitalized.
The school sent a note Tuesday strongly suggesting masks for the under-tens through the end of January, and I wrote back a very kind reply explaining that Cleo’s immune system is in a delicate negotiation phase right now and that covering her face for six hours interrupts what Coach Brennan calls “the cytokine handshake.” Coach Brennan runs the Saturday morning kettlebell class at the barn and also a Telegram channel where he posts one infographic a week, and the cytokine handshake one had over 800 forwards, so it is not nothing.
I did agree to send Cleo with a little tin of Marlene’s fire cider lozenges, which are technically not lozenges because Marlene refuses to use gelatin, so they are more of a sticky disc you have to chew. The school nurse said she couldn’t “administer” them and I said that’s fine, she can administer them to herself, she’s seven, she’s been doing her own elderberry since August.
The onion-in-the-sock thing, in case you’ve never done it: you halve a yellow onion, you slide it cut-side down against the arch of the foot, you put a wool sock over it, and you sleep. By morning the onion is gray-black and a little wet, and that is the toxins leaving through the meridian at the base of the big toe. Marlene’s been doing it on her kids since the youngest was in a Moby wrap and not one of them has had an antibiotic. The youngest is fourteen and benches her own weight, so.
Hudson said he’d try it last night and then I caught him at 11 p.m. quietly removing both socks and putting them in a Ziploc on the back porch “so the dog doesn’t get them.” I let it go. The man married into this and he has done his best.
The WHO will say what it says. I trust the kettle, the onion, the sock, and Tasha. Three days flat and slightly taller. We’ll check back Friday.