Archive for June, 2007

That’s Poison Ivy?

When I was a kid, I would get poison ivy early in the summer and keep a case of it throughout the playing-outdoors season.

I have told people that, if I saw it, it was too late. (Yeah, yeah, I know you’re supposed to be able to get it only by contact.)The truth of the matter, though, is that I seldom saw it in the sense of looking at it and recognizing what I was seeing. My mother and father would point out some to me. I would nod my head, and, within seconds, the image would be gone.

For a while I might remember that poison ivy has three leaves and that the ivy with five leaves is fine. But, before long, I would be thinking, “Is that three leaves or five leaves?”

That mental block has remained with me to this day. I never have trouble recognizing a maple leaf or an oak leaf. But I can stand there with someone pointing out poison ivy and saying, “That’s it” and think, “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

A couple seasons back, I got a bad case of poison ivy and was telling Mr. Whitfield that I had no idea where it had come from. You have a big poison ivy vine growing up the side of your oak tree, he said. You never noticed it?

Oh.

He said he would go get rid of it and did.

I got a bad case of poison ivy shortly after His Dogness came into my life. I looked up the picture again so that it would fresh in my mind and went over the route we had been walking. Sure enough, there it was growing in a hedge that His Dogness brushed up against as we walked down a path in the cemetery.

We changed our route.

After I got a bad case working in the backyard last summer, Garnet made me swear off doing anything more than mowing back there.(Notice how the adjective “bad” invariably precedes the word “case”?)

A week ago, I got another bad case. Given that I don’t go hiking in the woods, the most likely culprit was the grassy alley behind our houses where I walk His Dogness in the morning and when he gets up in the night. I took a look and saw some stuff that looked as if it could be poison ivy but my mental block prevented me from being sure. After looking it up on Google Images, I wondered how I could have thought it was anything else.

Maybe I should get a picture and carry it in my wallet. If I did that, though, I would need to get a wallet-size copy of that picture of Garnet, Sparkle Girl and Doobins that I keep on my desk at work.

It wouldn’t seem right carrying around a picture of my nemesis and not having one of the three people who bring so much light into my life.