Surely we can all agree on poison oak . . .

Saturday. Sofa. Coffee.

It is a beautiful morning in North Alabama. The bright sun has not yet taken the morning chill away, and the deer are still roaming at the edge of the woods behind the house.  Patches of  blue sky can still be seen through the bare branches of the trees up the hill, but it won't be that way a couple Saturdays from now.  The tips of the branches are loaded with green buds ready to explode.

Yep. Things are about to change around here.  Dandelions polka dot my yard, accented by wild onion.  Blackberry and wild rose bushes, sprouting tender young leaves, clandestinely sharpen their briars. Birds soar, dive and dart through my carport as nests appear in the corners of the ceiling, and in the utility room if I leave the door cracked.  I must remember not to let that happen again.

I enjoy the changes.  It is like traveling without going anywhere.  The changing scenery comes to me.

Which brings me to today's agenda.  When the world around me changes I have two choices.  I can participate in the change, or I can ignore it.  In Alabama, if one ignores the changes that come when Mother Nature awakes from her winter's nap, one might never be seen again, disappearing by mid-summer under a shroud woven of kudzu, blackberry, honeysuckle, summer cedar, wild rose, and Johnson's grass.

 As in life, participation can take different paths.  Often our first reaction to change is resistance.  Some changes must be resisted.  Take poison oak for instance. Please.  But please be careful.  That stuff is evil.  And like evil in our world today, it is everywhere.  When everything else was dying because of recent droughts, poison oak, the cock-roach of the flora world, thrived. Two years ago as the forest floor crunched with dead dry plant remains of all descriptions, a tempting, luscious bed of green carpeted the forest.  Poison Oak. And it lurks just outside my door, even today.  It must be resisted, if I can find my hazmat suit.

Other change must be controlled. That's a little trickier.  For one, honeysuckle is a nuisance, for another it is a vine to be cultivated.  Well pruned shrubbery is a delight to some, to others it looks like the lawn of an insurance company.  Bird nests in the carport are metaphors for the miracle of new life for some, but for others are just a source of nastiness, nuisance and disease.

So, I think I'll attack the evil poison oak first.  That will make it safe to go out and do those other things that aren't quite so obvious later.

Excuse me, I must go now, someone is knocking at the door.  I think it's kudzu. Or poison ivy . . . so creepy.

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