The poison plant and me.
I went home last weekend, and mom and I embarked on the major project of making the fence Bailey-proof. Bailey likes to get out underneath it and rile up the neighborhood dogs, so we got plastic fencing and other stuff to seal off the space between the fence and ground. We did two sections, digging a trench in which to bury the bottom of the fencing and staking it and then filling it in and nailing it to the wooden fence itself, but then we got distracted by the project of ripping this fence-eating vine/bush thing out of a different section.
We used a saw, the back of a hammer, and our wits to detangle it; when we got the first 6-foot section done, I said do you want to keep going? and mom said no, it looks like the rest will take a while, and then we worked until it was done. The thing had grown back and forth between the boards, some branches actually pushing the planks away from the frame with their growing. There were rotten bits of vine left from the last great detangling, which I pushed out with the hammer. We would saw it up close to the fence where it went through, then pull from the other side until it popped out.
It was satisfying, like working the knots out of a ball of yarn or finally getting something out from between your teeth.
Then mom came down with a wicked case of poison something, whatever that vine was. Sumac? Oak? It can't be poison ivy, because it wasn't ivy*. She gets poison something at least five or six times a year - eventually I'm sure we'll have to rush her to the hospital, but until that point she'll keep buying Zanfel by the gallon.
I myself had a few little red bumps on my wrist and arm, but nothing like mom's outbreak, which I have thought of the words to describe, but will not, because you do not want to hear it. Yar. But then at 5:30 this morning, I woke up to the fiery itching of this poison something, with the patches from before swollen and throbbing. I staggered into the bathroom to slather hydrocortisone on it, resisting the urge to apply it with sandpaper or maybe a fork (... just thinking about that makes my knees go a little weak). I laid in bed for an hour thinking about sandpaper, then the alarm went off ten minutes later.
When I came across the Benadryl Extra Strength Cream this morning, I realized that this case of poison something is not, in fact, a random incident or a metaphor for my grandmother's death; it is actually the universe's way of presenting me with the opportunity to use up the Benadryl before it expires in 04/06, just like it let me try out the new skin and that time I'd been complaining about how damned expensive health insurance was and how I'd never get the value out of it that I was putting in and then had the lupus scare.
*I learned what poison ivy looked like when I was a 10-year-old girl scout and this shit is NOT POISON IVY.
We used a saw, the back of a hammer, and our wits to detangle it; when we got the first 6-foot section done, I said do you want to keep going? and mom said no, it looks like the rest will take a while, and then we worked until it was done. The thing had grown back and forth between the boards, some branches actually pushing the planks away from the frame with their growing. There were rotten bits of vine left from the last great detangling, which I pushed out with the hammer. We would saw it up close to the fence where it went through, then pull from the other side until it popped out.
It was satisfying, like working the knots out of a ball of yarn or finally getting something out from between your teeth.
Then mom came down with a wicked case of poison something, whatever that vine was. Sumac? Oak? It can't be poison ivy, because it wasn't ivy*. She gets poison something at least five or six times a year - eventually I'm sure we'll have to rush her to the hospital, but until that point she'll keep buying Zanfel by the gallon.
I myself had a few little red bumps on my wrist and arm, but nothing like mom's outbreak, which I have thought of the words to describe, but will not, because you do not want to hear it. Yar. But then at 5:30 this morning, I woke up to the fiery itching of this poison something, with the patches from before swollen and throbbing. I staggered into the bathroom to slather hydrocortisone on it, resisting the urge to apply it with sandpaper or maybe a fork (... just thinking about that makes my knees go a little weak). I laid in bed for an hour thinking about sandpaper, then the alarm went off ten minutes later.
When I came across the Benadryl Extra Strength Cream this morning, I realized that this case of poison something is not, in fact, a random incident or a metaphor for my grandmother's death; it is actually the universe's way of presenting me with the opportunity to use up the Benadryl before it expires in 04/06, just like it let me try out the new skin and that time I'd been complaining about how damned expensive health insurance was and how I'd never get the value out of it that I was putting in and then had the lupus scare.
*I learned what poison ivy looked like when I was a 10-year-old girl scout and this shit is NOT POISON IVY.
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