Anyway, the place where we usually go to the beach has just the one bookstore and prominently features authors from the South Carolina lowcountry. (It drives my copy editor Honey wild that there is no consistency in how one "styles" (as she would say) those two words referring to the swampy beachy part of the more southern of the Carolinas). I'm not a big fan of most Southern writing, post, say, Yoknapatawpha, so the lowcountry fare wasn't going to do much for me. I chose, instead, a book called The Ruins. I didn't like it, which was a pleasant serendipity for Honey, who promptly started it and then recounted the plot to me when she was done.
I liked her telling of it much better than the 30 pages or so that I read of the book itself. Now, if you pay any attention to the current movie releases, you'll know that it has just been released as a film. The LA Times review described it as: "depressingly inert and blithely gruesome." The basic story of the The Ruins centers around killer ivy that eats you inside out.
Killer ivy should not be confused with Poison Ivy.
That's Poison Ivy.
That's killer ivy that eats you from the inside out.
I think I ended up reading a Spanish novel whose name escapes me right at the moment at the beach that summer.
Flash forward to this morning. I sometimes read the Sunday paper in what we call "the middle room."
Aside: does everyone have these kinds of labels for rooms? When I was growing up we referred to one room in our house as the "green room" even though it wasn't. I do understand it had been at one point.
Anyway, Honey and I are two people with many more pets than we need. We also have more bedrooms than we need. The "middle room" is a very small bedroom that we've turned into a sort of denette. I like to use it sometimes to escape the various technologies in my life. So, this morning, I retreated into it to read the paper. I was finishing the travel section (always my last section--paper section preference sorting is important to me) and I rolled my head around on my neck as I sometimes do.
As I did so, I noticed a vine. A vine. IN THE HOUSE. Poking out from under the blinds. Killer ivy. In the retreat room. It had grown THROUGH the window. Ok, really, it had grown through the gap in our 50 year old windowsill, but still.
Ten minutes of mild effort and I pulled all the ivy off the side of the house and Honey got the inside ivy into the trash can.
I'm not sure what lesson to take from all of this Sunday drama. One, lesson to be learned certainly focuses on using the middle/retreat room more and scouting it for unauthorized plant life more often. Another is that neither Honey nor I should really be allowed to own a home if we can't control our ivy.
Finally, for those of you who see me IRL, could you keep an eye out? If I start looking like that girl in The Ruins, help me somehow. Calling me "depressingly inert" might be a place to start.
5 comments:
I feel that it's very important to note here that we keep the middle room closed when not in use—often for vast stretches of time—because we do not share the decorative aesthetic of our cats, who would take any open-bedroom time as an invitation to work on their craft of shredding the middle-bedroom sofa bed. So it is not our lax attention to detail but our closure of the room, in defense of the sofa bed, that has allowed the vines to penetrate the middle bedroom. In other words, it's the cats' fault.
You look much more like Poison Ivy, so no worries ;p
We had "the big bathroom" and "the little bathroom" growing up. We also had "the green chair" (which was my designated reading spot because it was somewhat oversized and could hold me and my pile of backup books quite easily). We had a "dining room" which was really just one end of the living room, next to the kitchen.
Is the killer ivy somehow related to kudzu? Was the intruding ivy in your middle room related to kudzu? I'm afraid of kudzu. It seems to swallow up everything in its path. I've never been afraid of a plant before. Except maybe that southeast Asian enormous flowering plant that blooms once every hundred(?) ten(?) whatever years, and whose bloom smells like rotting meat.
Ivy actually freaks me out. It grows 5 feet over night sometimes. I know I probably just exaggerated a little. I dont think I want to see that movie...
The lesson you take is that not only should you be controlling your ivy, but you may wish to inspect the exterior edges of your windows and perhaps apply a new layer of caulk to seal them from such natural intrusions.
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