I thought the feeling of invincibility only lasted during your teenage years?
Last week, I decided to get busy on some yardwork at my new home. There was a patch of overgrown shrubs in the driveway turn-around area. There were masses of weeds and ivy that were suffocating the small azalea bushes that were just trying to hang on.
So I wore my floppy sun-hat and a pair of gardening gloves and started to pull up all the crap.
"Be careful, there's some poison ivy in there", Charles warned from the garage.
"Bah! I don't see any poison ivy." I thought back to my Girl Scout days when my handbook identified poison ivy as shiny leaves rimmed in red that were in clusters of threes.
This is what I was thinking of:
But apparently it doesn't always look like this.
So in a manic zeal of trying to be useful, I pulled at weeds, tore apart vines that grew among the shrubs, wiped away sweat with my (unknowingly tainted) gardening gloves and proudly displayed a 6 foot vine and root that I pulled from the ground, as if it was a prize fish freshly caught.
The results of my ineptitude did not reveal itself until the next day. There was some mild redness, a little itchiness. But we were on our way to driving to Disney World. I didn't have time to spend worrying about my itchy arms. So I picked up some cortisone and we were off.
A week later, my arms, and now chest and sides, are bearing the brunt of my stupidity.
Yes, that was poison ivy. No, I will not be doing any more 'gardening' in weedy areas anymore. Lesson learned.
No comments:
Post a Comment