While I was away...

So a lot happened in the past couple of years as I took my little bloggicatical.

Today's mail brought back to mind one -- the Michigan Bulb catalog arrived, and The Girl promptly hid it from Wifeypooh, for everyone's protection.

You see. Wifeypooh decided to try gardening this year. Now, for those of you without first-hand experience to the fearsome botanical powers of Wifeypooh, that last sentence was meant to sow fear and dismay into the readers of this post. WP, for all her ability to nurture children, husbands, and fat cats, is no friend of the plant kingdom. Actually, she’s more like some sort of herbaceous Dr. Mengele, her plants becoming innocent pawns in some obscene experiment on how best to torture and destroy all things green. I mean, this woman his killed cacti, for goodness’ sakes. The little plant we got after going through pre-Cana before we were married? Dead in a month. Plants given to her annually by her (brainwashed) adoring students? All deceased before July ends. We have had but one plant live more than a couple of months in their entirety of marriage, and that’s some sort of indestructible thing that from time to time reverts to consisting of five leaves on a wilted vine until I take pity on it and water it. The woman is just not a gardener…

But, like they say about second marriages, hope triumphed over experience, and Wifeypooh fell sucker to those lovely flower gardens in the Michigan Bulb Catalog. As The Girl wisely noted, “Mom, you’re having delusions of grandeur, you know you can’t grow anything.” Shady-Perennial plant mix in hand, visions of shade-tolerant flowers bloomed in her dreams.

Step One: clear the garden area. So one morning she just started ripping plants out of an old, overgrown flowerbed the previous owners of the house had cultivated. After watching her carefully pulling out the many, many poison ivy plants, making sure to wear gloves, etc etc for a couple of hours, well, that was taking too long, so I came over with the very large and dangerous pickaxe and started chopping away. Carnage ensued.

Well, it turns out when you chop up poison ivy roots you release the extra-special and potent supertoxin, which is apparently able to go through clothing, latex, time and space. And it turns out Wifeypooh is extra-specially allergic to poison ivy supertoxin. So, fast forward a week and I am slightly infected with a nice set of rashes, while WP has oozing pustules seeping poison ivy juice on several parts of her body. The infected areas looked like those blisters you get from second-degree burns, and were maddeningly itchy. Also, the local Board of Health required her to wear her hair loose, tear her clothing, cover her upper lip and shout “unclean, unclean!” whenever she went out in public.

Actually, she was given some sort of steroid, which unfortunately neither made her all pumped up like Arnold Schwarzenegger, nor actually cured the infection. The infection got in the blood stream and somehow started popping up in places that she had never gotten poison ivy juice on her – unless she was out cavorting in the ivy sometime at night wearing nothing but a smile. So on this went for four weeks. We bought out the inventory of every quack poison ivy cure the new Walgreen’s in town had, and had to burn all of the gardening equipment.

And needless to say, nothing ever grew in the shade garden… And where she did get stuff to grow in the front yard, it will most likely be torn up when the leaking water service pipe gets replaced in a couple of weeks. Next summer when the urge to garden hits her we’re going to save some time and money and just go out and roll in the poison ivy without buying any plants.