– In which Dorn spins a terrifyingly true tale of a fight to the death—and beyond!
he wounds, both physical and emotional, from my bloody battles since July with Arum Italicum are slowly mending. The blisters on my hands from ripping these agressive aliens out of the ground by the throat have broken and healed, and the angry red weal on my leg where I was splashed with their alien acid-blood has gradually faded to the dull pink-gray of an ancient war injury.
I had hoped my repeated skirmishes with the wily Roman weed were now behind me, only fodder for whispered tales (retold here, here, and here) to scare the virtual children around the virtual campfire on a cold dark night.
Yesterday I was puttering around in the yard, and something out of place caught my eye—there in the yard, towering high (well, several inches) above the struggling grasses and weeds that make up our turf, was a single broad, variegated leaf growing straight up from out of the ground.
What could it be? I wondered. I hadn’t seen a weed like that before in our yard. Do we have a new immigrant? Suddenly, I felt my stomach drop and a wave of paranoia washed over me (you know, like when you first see the zombie out the window illuminated by a lightning flash on a dark stormy night)!
During all my fights with Arum Italicum (also known as “Italian lords and ladies” by those who have fallen under its imperious grasp), I was always fixated on the bright festive cluster of berries that make it such a sought-after ornamental plant in its native country of Transylvania. Well, that, and the hard-to-extract corms buried deep underground like frozen tundral mastadon corpses, from which the heinous herb shoots out its fruiting bodies. I realized I didn’t even remember seeing any leaves, or if I did, what they looked like.
Google to the rescue! With trembling thumbs, I did a quick query of “variegated spear-shaped leaves” that brought up a page full of images. “Maybe“, I told myself, “it’s some harmless plant, like spearmint, or, I don’t know, arrowroot. After all, this is far from my old Arum Italicum battleground. It’s not even downstream from it.” I held my breath as I clicked on the image that most resembled my lawn find, only much, much bigger.
“ITALIAN ARUM!” screamed the caption! It was the same fiendish fern that I thought I had consigned to a deep earthy grave in the local landfill!
So I was donning my hazmat suit (fool me once, you acid-spewing triffid!) for another turf war (ha-ha, get it?) with this invasive, Facebook-friending herbaceous hooligan, when I had another chilling thought: “If one of the plants was able to escape and propagate way over here, what might be happening at the original invasion site?”
So I calmed my trembling limbs, crept carefully over to the area of the original landing of these invaders, and peered at the ground illuminated with a single flickering candle (and the sun, of course)….
They were EVERYWHERE! An army of them! They were my own personal Birnam Wood coming to destroy my Dunsinane! If anything, it seemed like there were more of them than took part in the original invasion.
And all pretense of finery was gone—no bright berry caps raised up on jaunty stalks, just row upon row of these fierce jagged leaves, coming at me, closer, closer, CLOSER… AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!
Thanks,
Dorn
10/21/2020