poison ivy
It began with sticks, with fallen branches. My son planted them like they were alive, jabbing their snapped-off ends into his sandbox. When he’d constructed a veritable forest of dead limbs, he collected crispy brown leaves and sprinkled them over the tops of the sticks, and handfuls of rotting pine needles. I wasn’t sure—did he know these were all dead? Did he think this forest was somehow going to take root, unspooling green leaves and tender buds?
Eventually, we’d dig up the forest, drag the sticks to the street to be gathered by the county, and dump fresh sand into the box. And it would begin again.
The forests grew everywhere: if he could find a stick, he could plant it. Maybe he’ll be an arborist one day, we’d say. His love for living trees was proven when he cried after we cut down two leaning over our front yard.
But then he expanded: now he is not just fascinated by trees, but by flowers and shrubs. Maybe it’s the long walks we take to the park next to our neighborhood, where there are beautiful formal gardens and a greenhouse and a children’s garden, where there are rows of vegetables and then, tucked in the back, a gate into the woods. They smell everything; they touch everything. They shriek in delight when they spot butterflies twittering around the milkweed; they shriek in terror when a bumblebee hovers too close.
We come home, and instead of forests erupting in the sandbox, small gardens sprout in the bare patches of dirt in our yard. He finds scraps of boxwood and nandina, shreds of moss, pieces of old wood that have, I suppose, a sculptural kind of beauty, and he arranges them all together. The empty swaths of flower beds in front of our house are hacked away with a small shovel, turned to mud when he figures out the garden hose.
Everything is plucked: clover blossoms, yellow dandelions, tiny white flowers on weeds I can’t identify. Pink azaleas, a lone lily bravely rising above the drooping bluebells. My water glasses are stolen away, small mason jars disappear and return to the house as vases for artfully arranged weeds. He’s thoughtful; he tucks in greenery, too, and occasionally a pretty twig.
He doesn’t want to live in our house anymore. He wants to live in a house with a flower garden.
I don’t blame him. That sounds nice to me, too. And I can envision myself as a gardener, but maybe fifty-year-old Bethany: no longer chasing after small children, reading the same books aloud until my voice is hoarse, grabbing everything out of the pantry or the refrigerator for my babes because they only thing they can reach is the freezer drawer. Maybe that is the version of me that is finally able to tame a patch of wildness, to cultivate, to reap a harvest. Maybe that is the me that slices my own tomatoes to eat on toasted einkorn sourdough, who snips my own mint to sprinkle on top of our biryani, who coaxes hyacinth and lilac and gardenias to flourish so I can smell something glorious instead of the compost bin and the chicken coop in the backyard.
But thirty-five-year-old Bethany is still struggling to keep the pothos and the aloe vera from yellowing. The Bethany who is me, now, would love a monstera or a fiddle leaf fig, but is wise enough to know those would not survive in my house. I’m on my fourth or fifth Norfolk Island pine, and it, too, is beginning to crisp at the edges, and when I sweep the kitchen I’m inevitably raking up brittle green fronds.
There is also the part of me that doesn’t want to invest much more in the landscape outside our house. What if we move? What if this isn’t our forever home, and I’ve devoted time and energy to whacking away the wild that doesn’t matter in the long run?
But my children love flowers, my children are asking for flowers, and so I carve out time on my calendar to pull weeds. When the beds are sufficiently prepared, we head to a nearby nursery specializing in native flowers. It is there that I first notice the bumps on my arms. Bug bites, I assume, from something buzzing around all the plants. The man who helps me select my flowers is riddled with bug bites, too. I write it off.
But these are not normal bug bites. They’re spreading, and soon instead of small welts I have stripes of oozing, itchy red blisters. I have large patches, bubbling up on the circumference of each spot and then crusting into dark gold scabs. These bug bites begin on my right forearm and my right ankle, but they are soon everywhere.
Not insect bites. Poison ivy.
Anxiety returns. Working in the yard is supposed to be therapeutic, but now I’m digging through the bottom drawer in my bathroom cabinet in search of the prescription steroid ointment I never use. A friend gives me a bottle of calamine lotion. I mix apple cider vinegar and bentonite clay and rub it over my welts, forgetting about the mask until I notice crumbling gray bits sprinkled all over my bed and white carpet.
What if the kids get it? They helped me in the flower beds. What kind of mother am I, not only to not recognize a plant germinated by Satan, but to expose my children to it? I assumed poison ivy was confined to the woods. It never occurred to me that something like that would grow happily among the azaleas and the boxwoods.
We head to the beach. The saltwater will cure me, I think. I’m tired from the nights spent scratching and slapping bandaids over my bleeding blisters. The sea will give me a much-needed respite.
Instead, the sun betrays me. I don’t burn, but in all the places where my skin is exposed to the light, a rash bubbles up under my skin, hundreds of tiny white bumps that itch far worse than the poison ivy. Somehow, I seem to have had an allergic reaction to the sun, although I suspect it’s because my skin is confused and wearied from the havoc wreaked by the urushiol.
Two weeks have passed. Tonight, we’ve booked a photographer for a family photo session. Two years have passed since our last. And I will be documented in all my rashy glory: the poison ivy has begun to fade, but my arms and legs are decorated in silvery new-skin patches and old dark red scabs. The sun rash, too, has faded, but my knees and the tops of my feet are still riddled in white bumps.
We’re in the car, and my children ask if it’s okay to pray. And in his prayer, Dean thanks God for how pretty our yard is now that we’ve planted flowers. Where once we had only weeds, mud puddles, and scrappy monkey grass, we now have dianthus, yarrow, milkweed, lavender, catmint, eucalyptus, and elderberry.
And I am struck by joy. My arms and legs are mottled, but my children are praying unprompted. My yard is still garnished with Dean’s gardens and forests of dead sticks and shrub trimmings, but my children are praising God for flowers.
I’m thankful, too.
