Oh, woe

For the disturbing image, I apologize. It's early in the morning to be so repulsed. That's my hand, my thumb, my affliction. Forgive me, but such ugliness is the only way to communicate the horror efficiently. I could enlarge the shot, but discretion dictates some reserve. Anything bigger would scare the women and the horses.

In the new heavens and the new earth, there will be no poison ivy. Either that, or I will be no longer afflicted by whatever weakness my system has for its venomous character. I'm not sure where what we call "the Fall" has affected things in the relationship between me and it, but I have faith I will no longer spend my early mornings fighting off the evil.

My crime, my sin, was pilfering a half dozen prairie roses--Iowa's own state flower--from the ditch just down the road. Pilfer makes me sound nefarious. I wasn't. No one cared. I am no thief, and I wasn't digging them up from someone's beloved flower bed. What stands just beyond the roses is crp land home to a few loud pheasants. Prairie roses are native, for pity sake. How can you steal what's already there? It wasn't highway robbery. 

Besides, for neatness's sake the thousands that were flowering a week ago will soon be lopped off anyway. Tree huggers should laud the way I was trying to bring back some of "what once was" to the backyard, the glory that once reigned before a century of row cropping turned the flowering prairie into a slave. My pilfering was perfectly righteous.

Those prairie roses weren't mine necessarily--they're ours, all of ours. Power to the people. I was simply redistributing the wealth, taking some of the ditch's millions and bringing them back to the poverty of my countryside back yard. 

Woe is me. I was born in Wisconsin's lakeshore woods, where poison ivy could be a cash crop if it had any non-hideous uses. I spent my childhood in woodland acres rife with it--and never took an itch home. During summers in late adolescence, I worked in a state park that was a kingdom of poison ivy. I was, as a boy, never thus afflicted.

But thrice in the last half-dozen years I've been struck, viper-like. Now, in my dotage, when I'm least capable of fighting it, I'm horribly afflicted. Last week again I told myself that this time I could beat it, spray on some way-too-expensive over-the-counter remedy, drop some benadryl. I could beat this wretch.

No go.

Yesterday, I threw in the towel and saw the Doc, who, in no more than three minutes, scribbled a prescription--five a day, then five again, then four, then four again, and etc., until the vial is gone--and pushed me out the door. Relief is on the way, but once again I was beaten by a green monster I thought I knew as well as, well, the back of my hand.

Here's what poison ivy is supposed to look like--a low-life, three-leave-r, right?

 

I saw nothing like that. Of course, I wasn't looking. But whoever heard of poison ivy along a road? What's with Iowa anyway? It's all your fault. You gravelly ditches are simply not supposed to have this stuff.

Here I am trying to beautify my America like this, and the creep that's poison ivy rears out of nowhere--I swear I didn't see it--grabs my hand, my leg and, of course, any other centimeter of my person I afterward touch, and turns a day or two afterward into bubbly, weepy monsters that ratchet my attention. 

Like that blind man in scripture, I honestly don't know what I did to deserve this. I'm just trying to live in the peaceable kingdom that is "the country."

Adam, you miserable wretch.

Here I am, itching myself to death, and all my pilfered prairie rose transplants out back look perfectly dead. 

Woe is me. Maybe it's time to think condo.