by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

It's a vine that has grown densely, like a carpet, over the whole of the chain-link fence that bounds two sides of the garden across the street from my house. And it is a perennial, not dying back during the dry season. Also, and this offensively, it has grown up and over the 10-14 foot succulents that stand just inside the fence.

If unchecked, I imagine that, like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe story, it will cover the whole garden, a wild force smothering the other, domesticated plants. As it is, with no further sun-filled heights available, it yet continues to grow, falling over itself, cascading in extravagant, grotesque, leafy billows from the tops of the succulents, while down below, it continues its conquering inward creep, entombing its rivals.

As these things are, at a distance, the vine has a seductive beauty, like vultures circling, gliding effortlessly on an updraft, over a dying animal. The green wall it presents towards the street, a part of the view from my apartment, is pleasing. Such verdure, especially year-round, here in our semi-desert climate, goes a long way towards mitigating, or at least towards balancing the destruction, the slow murder the vine performs. I also admit, that, not really a gardener, I had not considered its menacing encroachment until its growth exploded here in the rainy season.

I acquired a proprietary interest in the garden, when, after having expressed my admiration to and visited him several times there, its actual owner, he, Catalino, my neighbor three doors up from it, gave me the key to the makeshift gate that closes it off; a gate of light chicken-wire now heavily laden with green vine. When, several months later, several months ago, Catalino died I began putting some consistent effort into cleaning up the place.

There were hundreds of empty plastic containers strewn about in a back corner of the small lot, which may or may not have once been contained in plastic garbage bags, bags long since deteriorated by the sun's ultraviolet. There were hundreds of flimsy black plastic starter pots such as nurseries use, strewn and stacked haphazardly all about the garden without much thought to their size. Further hundreds of these starter pots and truncated soda bottles, having lost their living occupants and now just filled with soil, were clustered together, wedged among more fortunate, still-living plants. There were long, orange conduits (that once covered overhead electric wires) thread surrealistically through the branches of the garden's "great" mesquite tree, the noble specimen within whose shade I daily perform my morning yoga.

Having recently returned from three weeks nursing a sick dog in Colonia Allende, I was startled to see how much worse the vegetal invasion had grown. Last Sunday, two days ago I turned my attention to the beautiful vine from hell.

After my late afternoon bicycle ride, I took the matter, and my pruning shears, in hand and got to work. First I walked the outer perimeter of the front of the garden, moving along the sidewalk slowly, cutting all stems of the vine that rose up above the top of the 4.5 foot tall chain-link fence, all those I could find on that first pass. Then, I walked that inner perimeter doing the same. Then, I took my downstairs neighbor's 9-foot step ladder from our common patio, set it up on the sidewalk in front of the garden, climbed up, and went about cutting and pulling the vine off the sides and crowns of the succulents.

The vine, of course, wrapped around the branches and stalks of the succulent, did not want to let go. And in the process of pulling it, violently at times, I broke some of the finger-shaped leaves of the succulent. The resultant wounds dripped a milky-white sap. A few drops fell, at first, only onto my forearms and, I suppose, the hair of my uncovered head. But when a drop grazed my moustache and a drop or two got into my eyes I called over to my nextdoor neighbor, who was enjoying the Sunday afternoon with his family on the stoop in front of his house, and asked if the sap burnt. He walked over and assured me (incorrectly) that it didn't. Still just in case, I climbed down and flushed my eyes out with our patio hose. Undaunted, I went back to the process of saving the succulents, removing great masses of vine. But a short while later sensing that something was wrong with my eyes, I cleaned up the sidewalk, folded and replaced my downstairs neighbor's ladder, and got serious about trying to flush my eyes.

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Where I stopped working
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I had, forty-some-odd years earlier, very similarly carried out such hostilities against a plant in an environment that was new to me. I was cleaning out some overgrowth behind a house in Northern California, along the Russian River on the site of the former Catholic girls summer camp that we were converting into the college of naturopathic medicine I would soon attend. I had not heard of Poison Oak, nor was I aware that I was pulling up the highly toxic plant by the roots, in shorts and tee-shirt and barehanded.

The reaction was swift and extremely severe. By the evening of that day I was covered with a burning, stinging, itching rash. Large blisters filled with thick yellow liquid had formed over every part of my body. Having my testicles involved was the worst. Along with this hellish skin condition, I suffered fever and diarrhea for two days. I remember crawling in the night, along the path, up the hillside (the cabins were on stilts) to the toilet. I remember toughing it out alone, in that little cabin, under those beautiful Redwoods, when any hospital would have immediately given me a bed.

Last Sunday, two nights ago, after repeatedly washing my open eyes under the kitchen faucet, and submerging my face, also repeatedly, eyes open, in a large pot of water, while the situation deteriorated, I considered, and was urged to consider, medical care.

Some of the succulent recently freed
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There alone in my apartment, as night fell, with my eyes already very irritated and growing worse, burning and stinging, I struggled, with mixed success, to keep them open, and managed that long enough to go online and satisfy myself that there were no succulents in Mexico whose sap caused permanent blindness. Then, I called my daughter, who was with her mother, who suggested a better homeopathic remedy than the one I had taken taken: "Let's treat this as a 'burn.'" Navigating blindly to my remedy kit, I managed to open my eyes enough times to find and take the indicated medicine.

Then I voice messaged my downstairs neighbor, not the owner of the step-ladder, but his wife. She came right up to find me lying on my couch with a wet washcloth across my eyes. In all of this mayhem, I was getting hungry. So, buoyed up by her presence, I moved into the kitchen, cut up a zucchini, put it into a pot on the stove to steam. She offered to help, but the whole process took less than a minute.

I returned to the couch and asked if she had ice to cool the cloth that was cooling my eyes. She left and came back not five minutes later, with a plastic bowl containing ice and water and, on her own initiative, a cut up mango and some eye drops, both of which I accepted gratefully, before urging her to go back downstairs with her family. I kept my eyes open long enough, a few seconds at a time, to put some already cooked rice and beans in with the zucchini. Then, while that heated, I found an audio book of a story by Borges, The Alef, on YouTube.  Blindly I ate dinner and listened. Then, a mercifully cold wash cloth across my eyes, I lay back and listened more.

An example of the succulent growing free of vines
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My daughter was urging me to consider the possibility of going to the hospital to get my eyes professionally flushed. My downstairs neighbors had offered, on their own, to take me to get medical care. But after a few doses of homeopathic Causticum 30, at the end of Borges' story, I messaged my daughter that things weren't getting worse, and fell asleep.

Awaking, what may have been an hour later, I found that I could open, and keep open my right eye without pain, at least for a few minutes at a time, and that my vision was uncompromised. I messaged news of my improvement to my daughter and my downstairs neighbor, along with profuse thanks to both, and went to bed.

My recovery has continued over the last two days, gracias a Dios. My eyes are both still red and sensitive. Yesterday I made the mistake of rubbing my right eye. It responded with tearing and pain, and would not open for half an hour. Last evening the rash on my forearms began to itch. Applying olive oil makes it a little better and, fortunately, scratching it, as I just had to do in the middle of the night, also brings relief.

Borges was himself blind at the end of his life, with people reading aloud for him. This fact was not lost on me when I sat and listened to the recording of someone reading his story while I blindly ate my dinner. Borges main theme was mystical interconnectedness, of people, things, occurrences..., the basic integers that underlie life; hence his story, The Alef, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, being, kabbalistically, in their combinations, the fundamental stuff and force of existence.

I remember another story of Borges in which he meets his younger self on a bench by a river, which is either the Charles in Cambridge or the Danube or both; one river from the perspective of the younger and the other river for the elder. The elder Borges engages his younger self, who, of course, does not recognize the old man, who, unobtrusive, can only vaguely, tangentially hint at their mutual identity. I have this encounter daily. Each morning, when first looking into the bathroom mirror, I wonder, who is that old man? unable to influence, or even to be recognized by my younger self.

The plant responds to its rescue with new growth
*

The Alef, in Borges' telling, is a point in space that contains the whole of the world, viewed from every perspective. In other works he writes of a story that includes all stories, of a book that contains all books. However, if we can believe this weaver of fictions, that is an idea he inherited. Certainly, the maltreatment of plants (I should have spoken with them first) with dire consequences to myself, is a theme that has recurred in my life. Borges would no doubt draw a lesson.

I'd like to say that I have learned mine. But I feel compelled to defend the garden, at least imperfectly. Better clothed, with safety glasses and hat, after my forearms and eyes improve, and with a little conversation with the plants first, I think I'll be at it again, whether or not the tall succulents appreciate what I am doing for them.

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