Act 1, Scene 1: Barb, aka MIL (for Mother-In-Law): How about if we set the blind here, oh daughter-in-law who hath not hunted the elusive Eastern before now?
DIL (Daughter-In-Law) pulls the stops out on the blind and it unfolds like one of those windshield sun protector things, except about 225 times bigger: Sure!
MIL, unzips the door to the blind: OK, let’s put the chairs in now.
DIL, points to ground inside the blind: Uh, isn’t that poison ivy?
MIL: “Crap!”And so now, I suffer from meeting Mother Nature’s friend, (Poison) Ivy who showed up frequently during our two-day hunt last week. In fact, my husband says that if poison ivy were a cash crop, we’d be millionaires.
And, it seems everyone has a poison ivy story – like my husband’s late Uncle Junior. Which brings up another story about that particular uncle. After Junior was born, the nurse asked his dad what to he wanted to name the baby, and my husband’s grandfather (named George) said, “Why Junior, of course!” And, the nurse didn’t realize that he meant George as the first name, so his first name was Junior. I love that story.
So, Uncle Junior was a little ankle biter and went fishing with his boy cousins and needed to use the outdoor restroom. He wiped his little behind with a nearby leaf and you ought to know the rest of the story, but what you don’t know is that little Junior was a nine-year-old boy with a new step mom and he didn’t want her to attend to his backside. So he suffered.
When Junior grew up he worked for the gas company, and of course, worked around poison ivy. One day, the story goes, he saw a lineman eat a poison ivy leaf and asked him what the heck he was doing that for, and the lineman said he ate it to keep up his tolerance to it. [DISCLAIMER: DO NOT EAT POISON IVY!]
So remember the “leaves of three, let them be” and also, we at The WON do not recommend that you eat poison ivy, but we do remind you that Nature is a Mother and her best friend is (Poison) Ivy.
~Barbara Baird
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Publisher/Editor Barbara Baird is a freelance writer in hunting, shooting and outdoor markets. Her bylines are found at several top hunting and shooting publications. She also is a travel writer, and you can follow her at https://www.ozarkian.com. View all posts by Barbara Baird
Oh how I can relate… the poison ivy here in Southern Illinois is already over five feet tall.. the vines are snaking up the trees and brush piles. It may be a bad year for the morels around here but poison ivy is thriving!
Oh yeah, it’s everywhere! It’s everywhere! And take a good book along with you in case they stick you in a blind under a corn feeder for a day, like they did to me last year.
Ours never gets big enough to grow up the trees but I will be watching for it in Kansas!
Yikes.. I am very sheltered as we do NOT have Ivy or poison oak here.. I have never had to deal with either.,, no chiggers either.. wonder if they will be in South Texas when I go there this summer..
Aw.. the joys of nature indeed~
When my husband was a child, his family (who lived on Long Island) would vacation at a resort in New Hampshire where H.A. and Margaret Rey (author and illustrator, respectively, of the Curious George books) spent their summers. He remembers Mr. Rey eating poison ivy sandwiches, to prove that he was immune to it. Eventually, it catches up with you: the forest gods punish hubris. I used to boast that I had never had a poison ivy rash because I knew how to avoid it. One day, after a Bridging ceremony, one of my Cub scouts ran over and gave me a big ole bear hug. You guessed it — everywhere he touched me, I broke out in a terrible rash!