Did I Fall Asleep for 100 Years?
When my sister and her kids came to visit me last summer, I showed her a pretty purple trumpet-like flower from the backyard. I was fascinated by the intensity of color. Debbie was less than impressed. She identified it as a blue morning glory vine and warned me to be careful, because they'd smother and kill whatever they could grow their way over. Given that we still haven't landscaped our mish-mash of a backyard, I figured it the vines wouldn't matter until we got around to doing a landscape overhaul.
Then a few months passed. Cue dramatic music: dun-dun-DUN!
It started when I went into the garage to pull out the Christmas decorations. I was moving boxes around so that I could get to the far corner where the ornaments are stored. That's when I noticed something I'd never seen in our garage before: vines growing across the cement floor. In the dark. In the cold. I swung my flashlight around and up the back wall, only to see vines crawling up a 6 foot tall cabinet, across beams, and then twining around the air conditioner ventilation to the roof. Opening the wide garage door to see more clearly, I stared in amazement at evidence of the invasion. There were vines everywhere!
Didn't I see this in Sleeping Beauty? You fall asleep for a hundred years and nature takes over? To all of my friends who told me not to worry about my lack of progress on the Great Garage Project while doing chemo and radiation: well, apparently, I had reason to worry! Unknowningly, I was sacrificing our home to the elements all this time. Mon dieu!
Horrified by the vines, I started yanking them out the best I could, pulling and pulling to get them free of their twists and turns. They were coming through the garage vents and, near as I can tell, up the edges of the foundation. I called Kathy and she went around behind the garage, in the rain, to pull them up outside. Everywhere we looked there were more vines.
The vines were really difficult to remove, particularly because they twisted around everything and anchored themselves into place. One vine came through the garage vent near the base of the floor, under and around boxes, through the center of a rolled up carpet, up some shelves and then grew into a box.
The more I pulled them up, the more I thought about how the vines were like the veins of an alien creature. I pretty much grossed myself out. Now that I've seen how they can grow, I am convinced they would take down a building if they could. Probably all they need is time!
For now, however, we have vanquished them. We filled two lawn trimming barrels full of vines and now are planning regular patrols to keep everything trimmed back.
If that wasn't a scene from Sleeping Beauty, then I'm sure I saw it in Logan's Run in that Washington D.C. scene. The meek shall inherit the earth, indeed. I say there is nothing meek about blue morning glory vines. I have a new enemy!
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