wash your hands

With flu, snort and cough season well under way, Lohbado thought of how his grandmother Aida Stumps, who was a nurse before she married the Reverend Woodlot Stumps, preacher and founder of the Church of the Living Monument, would tell him to wash his hands. Lohbado, then Peter Stumps, feared microbes more than he feared sin. Sin was something abstract, related to his father's bad moods. Punishment was erratic and often had little connection with any sort of offence. Bacteria, on the other hand, could lead to immediate viral chaos, sore throat, vomiting, diarrhea, running nose, fever. Peter Stumps never forgot grandmother Stumps insistence that he wash his hands.