On this, the fourth day of my son's full-body rash, we have taken to ending every day with a gooey colloidal oatmeal marinade. Tonight, Eliot wanted to help sprinkle the packet of powder into his bathwater. We looked around for something to stir the big cauldron of comfort. A bubble wand was too flimsy, a mermaid doll too bendy. I poked around the bottomless kitchen utensil drawer until I happened up a thick wooden spoon with a flat bowl. I had forgotten I still had this monster, a stirring stick brought back from my travels in Zimbabwe 15 years ago.
"What's that?" Eliot asked.
"A mugoti," I replied. Stunned. From somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain, I had retained this piece of Shona vocabulary. During my stay with host families, I had used a mugoti several times. Poorly. Most nights, I watched my sisters and mother draw and slam the flat, round end against the increasing thickness of the sadza in the cooking pot. The mealy-meal sadza, a mash made from milled, white maize, boiled and popped menacingly as it approached the consistency of roofing spackle. Most Zimbabwean women could put a rhino in a headlock with their upper arms alone.
Eliot stepped into his bath and chased the chunks of oatmeal with his wooden baton, mashing them against the porcelain edge of the tub. "I like this mugoti," he said to me.
"You do?"
"Yes. But let's go to the store and get a pink one."
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