Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Gone with the, uh, wisteria? If only it could be so, one native son wishes

By J. FRANK LYNCH
jflynch@theCitizenNews.com

The wisteria is trying to kill me.

It's angry because for the first time in decades of runaway, unbridled growth, someone is trying to tame it. I am determined to save the yard and the house, and the neighbor's trees and the power lines across the road, too, one snip and tug at a time, if that's what it takes.

So it has decided to assault me. Whenever I sever another of its far-flung tendrils, it strikes back,bopping me in the back of the head with a strand I did not see. It wraps around my ankle as I turn to walk away. It curls through the wheels of the mower as I cut at its evil offspring, running just underground across the yard like that giant worm thing from the "Tremors" movies.

I fear that one night soon, while I am sleeping, it will silently creep up the side of the house, lift the screen, come through the window and wrap itself around my throat. It's got at least one rope-like vine that runs the full width of the house, emerging the other side under the kitchen sink.

You gardeners may ask how I allowed this to happen. I didn't. I will only tell you that I tried to read up on the thing, which means I went to the Internet. And this is what I learned:

There are a lot of nudist camps in the Midwest with "wisteria" in the name. I don't know, it might be a chain.

So why live in a house being terrorized by an indestructible member of the pea family (something else I found on the Internet)? It's not just any house. And it's not just any wisteria.

It is my grandmother's house, and she planted the wisteria way before I was born. Her intentions were good. Wisteria, for all its annoyances, does produce a beautiful, grape-like bunch of blossoms that smell like summer. For years, this wisteria grew straight from the ground and wrapped itself around some tree in the side yard that was patient enough, or naive enough,to support its madness.

But the tree finally gave up 20 years or so ago and tumbled over. And the wisteria, like a prison escapee suddenly realizing he is free, began to branch out. Aggressively.

When I moved into the house in November and made an assessment of the yard, it was the wisteria from hell that caught my eye. It wasn't until the thing came back to life this spring that I fully realized the potential evil of my foe.

It got this way not by intended neglect, but just because. My grandmother, Stella McEachern Tate, who lived in this house and tended this garden as long as she could, passed away in July 2001 at the age of 101. Do the math. It was never a problem remembering her age.

She was born in Fayette County in 1900, the oldest of 11. Her father, Walter McEachern, was born here, too. And so was his father. And his father before that.

In fact, my grandmother's great-great-grandfather, Sanford McEachern, was already farming here in 1826, when Fayette County was first carved from Creek Indian lands.

This time, I'll save you the math: That makes me a seventh-generation Fayette Countian.

I'm telling you this not to boast (some would think the opposite) but for background. Last fall, I found myself right back where I started, literally, living in the drafty, dusty farmhouse my grandfather built from the ground up. As I write this, I look out the window and across the road to my parents' first house, where I lived until I was 3. Or so they tell me.

Are you with me? I've come full circle.

The circumstances aren't important anymore, because as oddly forked as the road back to this place has been, I know now it's where I am supposed to be. A college degree and a steady climb up the career ladder led me further from home, and no matter the success along the way, something always felt lacking, a dream or a duty unfulfilled.

Call it fate or luck or coincidence that in early February, quite by circumstance, I found myself sitting across from the publisher of this newspaper as he described duties he needed filling in a position he didn't have available.

"Why would you want to work here?" he finally asked.

Because, I told him, the job he was describing was the one I had been working toward my whole life.

Fate? Luck? Coincidence?

"Providence," he said.

What else can it be? How many people are handed the opportunity to go back to the restful, comforting place of their youth at the most discomforting time of their lives?

Providence.

So back to the vine: Considering the alternatives, of where I was and where I could be, the challenge of a wisteria gone mad turns into inspiration.

Wisteria, you've met your match.