Rural Routes, Blog Version

How could I possibly connect fungi, poison ivy and the Vulcan greeting in one blog?

Perhaps because it is September.

My mid-September daily dog walks are an opportunity to watch our world as it moves towards fall.

There are deer in the abandoned golf course I walk through every day – at least four female adults, two with single fawns, two with twins. That makes ten. One evening they were joined by a mature male with antlers to make eleven. Most days I only see one or two families at a time. They are out in the open much more often than they were in the heat of summer.

The Canadian geese, too, are around in large numbers and the gravel walkways are covered in their droppings. They are iconic birds, but not neat ones.

I also see that nature’s colours are beginning to change. Poison ivy plants, for example, are no longer green. Someone told me they didn’t think that there is poison ivy in the city. I begged to differ. The leaves of three are there and I let them be.

On my walks I also see fungi, many different kinds of fungi on trees and branches and growing on the ground. There are puffballs, red fungi that look like tomatoes, lacey fungi, dense clusters of fungi low on the ground.

I am not the only one noting their prevalence.. Social media feeds are rife with fungi photos.

All of it makes me itchy.

+++++

It was September, the year that I was ten. I went for a walk and somehow stumbled into a patch of poison ivy. I didn’t realize it until the next day when the rash appeared on my arms and legs, midriff and face.

My mother used calamine lotion, but as the rash spread, the bottle emptied. Someone told her that cornstarch in water was helpful and she covered me in the paste.

What started out as a few small blisters became blister upon blister. My face swole with them. My skin was a bumpy landscape that started to ooze as the blisters broke and spread the rash even further. To me they looked like mushrooms sprouting from my skin.

Eventually, I was taken to the doctor and would spend several days in hospital. I had been living in pajamas but could not pull the pajama top over my head. Mom cut the fabric with scissors to free me from my clothing.

She also cut the sleeves so that I get them over my splayed fingers. Blisters filled the space between my second and third fingers on each hand.

Since then – and it is many years since then – I can still without effort separate my fingers two on each side like the Vulcan greeting used by Star Trek’s Mr. Spock – or the Nanu Nanu greeting made famous by Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy.

When I had a similar, but less severe, experience the following year, I was given a series of injections to lessen my sensitivity to the poison ivy toxin.

I was in my late 20s when I had another poison ivy experience, but it was easily contained. I am not sure whether that was due to the injections or whether I had grown out of my sensitivity to the toxin.

By then, of course, I had long since learned to recognize the poison ivy plant and I learned to stay away from it. I learned to wear clothing that covered my skin whenever I was in a place where poison ivy could grow.

But I never forgot the motion memory that allowed me to spread my fingers in the Vulcan way and I never got over that visceral reaction to fungi.

They make my skin crawl.

-30-