Leaves of Five

I was very productive yesterday — I put down more mulch, did some laundry, worked on the pool chemicals and did a lot of mowing.  Being slightly ambitious, I decided to tackle the Back 40.  I soon discovered that I just don’t have the upper body strength to keep the mower from wanting to flip over, so I gave up.  On my way back down the hill, I ran over a huge patch of poison ivy.  As thoughts of poison ivy particles clinging to my body and being inhaled raced through my head, I got the mower down off the hill as fast as I could and then spent half of an hour in the shower scrubbing all of my skin off from head to toe.

I spent some time looking poison ivy up on the internet and discovered that what I had spent 32 years thinking was poison ivy is actually a very harmless Virginia Creeper.  In fact, it was just a few weeks ago that I responded to John’s inquiry about a particular plant with something like: “Oh, that’s not poison ivy.  Everyone knows that poison ivy has five leaves and looks like a pot plant.”  DOH!  Not so.

(not poison ivy)                                                                      (poison ivy)

My new mantra?

“Leaves of three, let it be;

Leaves of five, who cares?”

Last night’s visitor was a raccoon.  The cats kept talking to it through the window screen, but it didn’t seem to care.  It started down on the ground cleaning up dropped seeds, and then climbed the Dogwood tree to shovel in bird food from the platform feeder.  Piggie.

The tops of my hands are red and feel very warm today.  I was worried that a plant I tried to evict from the Azaleas might be poison oak.  The urushiol test was negative (the sap on the paper didn’t turn black) so it shouldn’t be poison oak.  I talked to John about it.  He and Phil are pretty sure I would be in world of hurt right now if it really was poison oak, so maybe I just sunburned the tops of my hands while mowing the grass?

This evening brought some brief thunderstorms and a skunk to the front yard — foraging for whatever.

The pool is looking good though!

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