You’d Butter Forget Those Old Wives’ Tales

One Christmas Eve, when I was eleven, I decided to make myself some tea. I put a pan of water on the stove and tried to turn on the burner on our gas stove. The burner wasn’t igniting and so I moved the pan and bent over to check if the pilot went out. Just as I bent over, the burner flared to life and caught my hair and my ear on fire.

I panicked and ran screaming into our front room where my mom was visiting with a friend. My mom stood up and literally smacked the fire out with her hand.

Mom’s Friend: “Put butter on it!”

My mom ignored her and got a wet, cool washcloth for me to put on it.

Mom’s Friend: “[Mom], you should put butter on it.”

After about a minute, my mom took a look at my ear and made the decision to take me to the hospital.

Mom’s Friend: “She doesn’t need a hospital, just butter.”

No butter was used and we went to the hospital. I was seen fairly quickly and it turned out that I had second- and third-degree burns on my ear. Normally, they would want to admit someone with the burns I had, just to be safe, but since it was a holiday and I was a kid, they let me go home with some special burn cream and painkillers. 

Before we left, my mom mentioned to the doctor how her friend kept telling her to put butter on the burn. He was aghast. He wrote a note on the paper they used for sick notes for my mom’s friend detailing why not to put butter on a burn. I was kind of out of it when I got home, so I don’t know if my mom ever gave her friend that note, but I don’t remember her ever saying to put butter on a burn again.