Every summer as child I wore rubber
boots. We all wore rubber boots because we
were always mucking about in the creek in the wooded valley behind our
house. The valley dove steeply under the
sheltering limbs of red oak and maple trees, the hemlock and the bristly pine. At the bottom the little silver creek wove
its way down toward the harbour and the lake beyond.
The pathway was lined with the flowering
trillium, milkweed, odiferous skunk cabbage, and poison ivy. The trillium we treasured. The sticky milkweed was interesting and
predictably sticky; we had to test that every summer. Skunk cabbage was great because when you
kicked it, it smelled like a skunk. What
more could a kid ask? And poison
ivy? I was allergic to poison ivy, which
was one reason why I wore rubber boots.
The idea was that the rubber boots,
which reached all the way up to my knees, would protect me from the annual
plague of poison ivy on the bottoms of my feet.
Every year I would end up with poison ivy on the bottom of both my feet
and I could never figure out why until many years later.
It was late at night and we had just
retired for the evening. There was a
noise outside. A prowler? I got out of bed, put on a bathrobe, slipped the
loafers on my bare feet, grabbed a flashlight, and headed out into the back
yard. Standing by the back fence I realized
that I was standing in poison ivy. I
carefully backed out hoping that I hadn’t brushed against the poison ivy.
A few minutes later I stood in our
bedroom. I hung up the bathrobe. Then I slipped off my loafers. First I put the arch of one foot against the
heel of the other shoe to leverage it off my foot; then reversing the
procedure, I put the arch of the bare foot against the heel of the other loafer
and slipped that shoe off. I might as
well have walked bare foot in the poison ivy; but now the old riddle was
solved. I carefully washed both feet
with yellow Fels Naptha Soap and escaped another summer brush with poison ivy.
There are things that we have done in
our past that had negative effects that we had neither the experience or the
wisdom to understand. One of the advantages
of maturing is the gift and grace of understanding. Now, if by accident I walk in the poison ivy,
I take great care when I remove my shoes.
