Page 136 - a-columbia-county-boys-recollections-and-memories-of-columbia-county-florida-(2012)-lenvil-h-dicks

A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

I INVENT A CURE

The children and I went on more than one trip to Hawaii, and I recall on one of our trips to the Islands
that the kids went swimming at the beach one morning, and then we got in the car and were simply
riding around that afternoon. This must have been about 1976, and Andy would have been between the
age of 6 and 9 years old, and he had received a horrible sunburn over his entire body that morning while
at the beach.

He was in such misery, and the sunburn was hurting him so bad, that I desperately wanted to do
something for him, but we were miles out in the country, and I simply did not know what to do.

About that time we passed by a large aloe plant, and I suddenly remembered that I had heard somewhere
that the juice in the aloe plant (also commonly known as a century plant) had curative ingredients in it,
and so I stopped the car and decided to see if the aloe plant really had curative powers.

I had a large butcher knife in the car that we were renting, since I had planned to stop from time to time
and peel and eat a pineapple and that butcher knife came in handy for me to cut off one of the large
limbs off the aloe plant, and to skin the outer section off and get right down to the pulp. I then rubbed
this damp aloe pulp all over Andy’s body, and believe it or not, within 10 minutes the sunburn had
turned back to his normal flesh color, and the burning and hurting had stopped. It was almost as if that
aloe plant were magic.

Since that time of course there has been much medical progress, and it is very common now for aloe
plants to be raised in large quantities in the Caribbean Islands to be used for medical purposes. I do not
claim to have invented the aloe cure for sunburn, but I certainly tried it, and it certainly worked.

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