The wisteria is trying to kill

me.

It's angry because for the

first time in decades of runaway, unbridled growth, someone is trying

to tame it. I am determined to save the yard and the house, and the neighbor's

trees and the power lines across the road, too, one snip and tug at a

time, if that's what it takes.

So it has decided to assault

me. Whenever I sever another of its far-flung tendrils, it strikes back,bopping

me in the back of the head with a strand I did not see. It wraps around

my ankle as I turn to walk away. It curls through the wheels of the mower

as I cut at its evil offspring, running just underground across the yard

like that giant worm thing from the "Tremors" movies.

I fear that one night soon,

while I am sleeping, it will silently creep up the side of the house,

lift the screen, come through the window and wrap itself around my throat.

It's got at least one rope-like vine that runs the full width of the house,

emerging the other side under the kitchen sink.

You gardeners may ask how I

allowed this to happen. I didn't. I will only tell you that I tried to

read up on the thing, which means I went to the Internet. And this is

what I learned:

There are a lot of nudist camps

in the Midwest with "wisteria" in the name. I don't know, it

might be a chain.

So why live in a house being

terrorized by an indestructible member of the pea family (something else

I found on the Internet)? It's not just any house. And it's not just any

wisteria.

It is my grandmother's house,

and she planted the wisteria way before I was born. Her intentions were

good. Wisteria, for all its annoyances, does produce a beautiful, grape-like

bunch of blossoms that smell like summer. For years, this wisteria grew

straight from the ground and wrapped itself around some tree in the side

yard that was patient enough, or naive enough,to support its madness.

But the tree finally gave up

20 years or so ago and tumbled over. And the wisteria, like a prison escapee

suddenly realizing he is free, began to branch out. Aggressively.

When I moved into the house

in November and made an assessment of the yard, it was the wisteria from

hell that caught my eye. It wasn't until the thing came