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Elizabeth Hunter
Poison Ivy I
Poison ivy grows not only in rich woods, but also fields, pastures, banks, up trees and along fences.
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Elizabeth Hunter
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Elizabeth Hunter
Poison Ivy Climbs Tree
Poison ivy creeps into your outdoor space like clutter creeps into your life; both can be a source of irritation.
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Elizabeth Hunter
Poison Ivy I
Poison ivy grows not only in rich woods, but also fields, pastures, banks, up trees and along fences.
Poison ivy is nothing to be trifled with. Years ago, I wrote a column for this magazine called “In Praise of Poison Ivy” – about how its berries keep birds alive in winters when there is little else for them to eat. Praise isn’t something I’ve been much inclined to heap on poison ivy recently. It’s been giving me a time since sometime in late May, when I must have made serious contact with the vine. That’s easy to do, because it’s rampant here, carpeting forest floors, wreathing tree trunks, infiltrating my clearing from the perimeters. For a long time, I was very wary of it, having had a case bad enough 20 or 30 years ago to need a shot and steroids. Recently, I’ve become more careless. Every once in a while I’ve had to apply calamine to a spot on my forearms or hands, but in a few days it’s always cleared up.
Which is why I didn’t pay much attention when I started scratching a place behind my knee a few weeks ago. I was busy writing articles and getting the garden in shape to abandon while I spent a week in Vermont. When I realized that the itchy spot had grown and spread to my other leg, I reconstituted the ancient bottle of dried out calamine with tap water to swab the angry red patches. To no avail. On the way to the airport, I bought some clear “anti-itch” lotion to daub on the large welts that now covered major portions of my arms and legs. I daubed in the airport restroom and discretely on the plane. Away from the ubiquitous source of the problem, the poison ivy would go away, I assumed. It didn’t. In Vermont, I finished the first bottle of lotion and bought another, along with a tube of something that offered eight-hour itch relief, and one of cortisone cream. Nothing helped. By now I was writhing like an earthworm on a hook, wishing for a way to take up residence outside my body. I woke in the night, body afire, scratching scratching scratching. A couple of days before I flew home, I paid $34 for an over-the-counter product that by its very price ought to have solved the problem. To use this stuff, I had to wet the affected areas and scrub them until the itching stopped, then shower the medicine off. The relief it offered was miraculous but temporary. Two hours after what was supposed to be a one-time treatment, the itching returned.
In the four wretched hours I spent in the Pittsburgh airport after my second flight home was cancelled, I vowed to go to the doctor. I was on the phone at 8 a.m.; in the clinic by 10. The doctor took one look at my arms and legs and wrote me a prescription for prednisone, another for an antihistamine, and suggested oatmeal baths. The six-day steroid treatment began with a massive dosage, reduced every day. For the first three or four days, all went well. I took two (sometimes three) oatmeal baths a day, consumed pills as directed and watched the swollen welts on my arms and legs become red patches, then begin to fade. The itching almost disappeared – until, on the fourth or fifth day I realized with dismay that I was scratching more instead of less. I was jumping out of bed at 3 a.m., to take an oatmeal bath. The day I took my last pill, I was back at the clinic, where another doctor prescribed a longer though less dramatic course of prednisone. She explained that the six day treatment had been prescribed because they try to get patients off the drug as quickly as possible. In my case, six days hadn’t been quite long enough. I can understand why they want you off prednisone quickly, because it has powerful side effects that, in my case, included insomnia and a breathless, jumpy hyperactivity.
It so happened that my prednisone treatment coincided with a long, intense and frustrating period of rain. The garden desperately needed attention. The grass, already dense and luxuriant, was shooting up. The raspberries were ripening and molding. The rain – descending in torrents, drizzles and steady workmanlike showers (the kind of rain I’d prayed for, earlier in the season) – never let up. Although it wasn’t raining inside, it felt as though it had. My dog was shedding like mad; the papers on my desk felt sodden; the whole place felt mingy, constricting, close. I craved a sense of spaciousness, an airiness, a means to survive the hot months ahead. Furthermore, I was about to begin a big writing project which would consume the summer. For reasons I don’t understand but have learned to accept, I can’t begin such a project without first getting everything in order. Unable to get outside, coursing with prednisone energy and saddled with hours I couldn’t sleep in, I took aim at my house.
There’s a room in it that has always irritated me – a catchall, without definition or order, where everything that doesn’t fit in my office, kitchen, living room or bedroom ends up.The room is dark, partly because its only window looks out on the porch, partly because, back when I used it as a darkroom, I painted its walls taupe. I’ve made periodic unsuccessful stabs at turning it into a place I wanted to go instead of avoid. A couple of years ago, I started painting it white. Stymied by its accretions, I soon gave up. Cluttering it were two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, two filing cabinets, sewing machines and fabric, a bureau, a folding table, the microwave (a behemoth that came with a new car in 1984 and is too big for my small kitchen), and many boxes of “stuff.”
What I wanted it to become was a work room for sewing and other projects, I decided. That meant that the filing cabinets and one bookcase had to go, which meant getting rid of hundreds of books, magazines and files. No matter. I waded in. I emptied the filing cabinets and filled every available box with old tax returns, 20-year-old files and magazines, then carted them to the recycling center in multiple trips. A friend relieved me of the filing cabinets. Another took the folding table. When a woman I hadn’t talked to in years telephoned, she mentioned she was teaching a course at the prison. Could they use books? They could. As the days passed, the culling got harder. What among all this did I need? What books did I want at my fingertips? What stories, of all those I had written for magazines and newspapers, should I keep?
Day after day, I dug, discarded, cleaned, painted. I’m still slogging along, dogged as the rain. I can’t say I’m loving what I’m doing; I’d like the end to be in sight. But I’m grateful something impelled me to take this chore up, because amidst the detritus, I’ve found some wonderful things. Photographs of ancestors. A file of feature stories I’ve been looking for for 10-15 years. Letters from my dad, written before the advent of ephemeral e-mail, full of praise for pieces I’d written that made him cry, of ideas he was mulling over and wanted to share. Full of him. On the eve of the fifth anniversary of his death, all the force of his love and support has come back to me. As for books, I’m refining my collection to what speaks to my passions or my work. The rest will follow those I’ve already donated to the prison, where my hope is that men more caged than I’ve been by rain and poison ivy will find transport to worlds they can’t otherwise reach. The air is still heavy; I still itch. But I’m beginning to feel what I’ve been longing for: an incredible lightness of being. Which makes me suspect I have just done something I never imagined I would – written another column in praise of poison ivy. Wonders never cease.