Get Rid of Lice with Mineral Oil

I only saw them a few times each year, but some of my earliest memories are of my grandparents. My Mom has seven sisters. I have one brother and eighteen first cousins on her side of the family, so when we visited my grandparents on holidays, their house was so crowded that there weren’t nearly enough chairs for everyone.

The older folks sat on the living room chairs. Most of the kids played games upstairs, or outside if it didn’t rain. My aunts chattered while they worked in the kitchen, and the uncles stood with their backs to the wood stove in the living room, swapping stories about fishing, hunting, farming, trucks, anything “manly”. Grandpa told more stories than anyone.

My favorite sitting place was on the linoleum floor in the living room where I could listen to Grandpa’s stories. They improved each time he told them.

He said “I got lice once. My mama combed and combed my hair and picked nits for days. I begged her to cut if off, but she wouldn’t.”

I hadn’t heard this story before. I didn’t usually interrupt, especially with so many people around, but I had to know. “Was combing supposed to get rid of lice?”

“It was a nit comb. They picked all the lice outa your hair, and then they combed and combed tryin’ to get rid o’ the nits. They never got ‘em all so they’d just come back.”

I asked, “why wouldn’t she cut it?’

“I had long blond curls and my aunts thought it was real pretty. I cried and cried and begged her to cut it all off.” He laughed a big “haw, haw, haw.”

“Why did they want you to have long hair?”

“Back then boys had long hair until they were out of dresses.”

“Dresses? You wore dresses?” This was unbelievable!

Yeah, ‘til we were five or six. Then we wore short pants. We didn’t wear long pants ‘til we were older.

My Grandpa was six feet, six inches tall, and nearly bald. I had never seen him wear anything but overalls and flannel shirts. Getting dressed up just meant wearing new overalls and a new flannel shirt. When he put me on his shoulders and walked around the farm, I thought I was in the sky. It was hard to imagine him as a four-year-old blond boy wearing a dress and crying, while his aunties combed his long curly hair. Was he only four years old? How could he even remember it?

Sometimes Grandpa’s stories didn’t have endings.

Years later, I told Grandpa about how I discovered a remedy for lice. My children brought home notes from the school nurse who had determined that they both had head lice. I was to buy de-lousing shampoo, treat them according to the directions on the bottle, then send the empty box back to school to prove they were cured.

Our budget was really tight then, and that shampoo was expensive, but I bought it and followed the directions. I just had to leave the shampoo on their heads for ten minutes before rinsing, and then remove the nits with the nit comb. My children had very fine hair, so the nit comb was absolutely useless.

I also had to gather up all the stuffed animals and everything else in the house that could possibly harbor a louse, and seal it all up in garbage bags for two days because all the lice would be dead by then. I washed and dried all their bedding and the clothes and jackets that couldn’t be done without for two whole days. What a job!

A few weeks later, they both brought home another note from the school nurse, and we went through the whole process again. Only this time my head was itching too, so I bought two bottles and shampooed all our heads with the expensive stuff and washed everything in my bedroom too.

The third time the nurse sent home notes, I took matters into my own hands. The shampoo was expensive, and obviously didn’t work. I checked the kids’ heads. Sure enough, there were bugs. I picked off a few and arranged them on the kitchen counter. To my surprise, the bugs cooperated. They stayed put for the most part. They wiggled, but didn’t go far. It was like they couldn’t get any traction on the laminated countertop. I experimented with possible remedies from the kitchen.

The first bug swam around in the drop of vinegar I doused on it. The second one wiggled in the baking soda trying to find a way out. But the third one stopped moving immediately when I put a drop of cooking oil on it. Aha! I put a drop of oil on another bug. It died too. Maybe the oil smothers them!

I walked across the street to the same drug store where I had bought three bottles of de-lousing shampoo at about seven dollars per bottle (That was years ago; I think it’s twenty dollars now.) and bought a bottle of mineral oil for sixty-nine cents. Just to be sure, I tested it on another bug. Success!

The only thing I did differently with this treatment was rubbing mineral oil, instead of de-lousing shampoo, into our hair. After ten minutes I washed it out with our regular shampoo. I bagged up all the clothing and fuzzy stuff again, and washed all the bedding, just the same as the first two times. It took three shampoos and rinses to remove all the oil, but none of us ever had lice again.

I didn’t have an expensive empty box to send back to school this time, so I wrote a note to the nurse telling her what I had done, that I wasn’t going to buy any more of that shampoo, and asked her to check the kids heads again. She never replied.

When I told my Grandpa about how I found my own remedy using mineral oilfor head lice, he said, “Coulda told ya that.”

I’m still scratching my head.


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