You must know by now that I think war is a bad thing.
I must confess to continuing to engage in the poison ivy, oak, and sumac war, however. I have no excuses for my behavior. I believe that my wholesale killing of these plants may be regarded as genocide. On my own property, I will behave as I want in regard to my plants.
The above named three must die.
On other people's property, however, I have no control.
None.
Today I went to the Cayuga Nature Center to help Dave Gell of the Black Locust Initiative run the program about water quality and stream life. Ten or twelve kids and I talked about evapotranspiration (are you impressed? big word!) and erosion and how the health of a stream can be determined by the organisms found in the water.
I was learning how to run the program from Linda Speilman, who's on the Cayuga Nature center page if you care to look around, and learning how to identify stone fly and may fly larvae.
This was all swell until the crane fly larva showed up. Ewwwwwwwwwwww. So gross.
I do not like squishy invertibrates. Slugs, for example, give me the heebie jeebies. So crane fly larva are maybe three inches long and the thickness of a pencil and slightly segmented, as if they have loose rubberbands around their bodies. So disgusting. (I'd put in a picture of one, but I don't want to look at them now. I'm getting ready to sleep.)
The also brought me a leech.
Not good for me. Too many doses of the willies in a day is bad.
But! By the end of the day I could look at them without jumping or inhaling really quickly. That was good. And I'd learned to tell the difference between stone fly and may fly larvae (may fly larvae have gills on their back segments).
But what does all that have to do with my war against poison plants? Well! The entire place was overgrown with poison ivy. Both sides of the path all the way to the stream and sprinkled about along the soil near the stream.
I have survived without incident. I do not think my students did. I like to think, though, that if they listened to me, they are now rewarded with no itchiness. And if they didn't listen, well, it's not my fault and maybe they should listen to someone like me.
As I got in my car to leave, poison ivy brought the battle home. I was parked next to a tree that was slowly dying. Growing from the trunk of that tree was...
Poison Ivy.
I have to give it credit for tenacity and subterfuge. But it didn't catch me this time. I will continue to do my best to evade its capture and to destroy its forces.
Posted by dotty at June 21, 2004 11:17 PM