The Couscous Chronicles

For the last seven years I have been locked in a mortal combat of absolute epic proportions.  While I had originally intended to write about my ongoing love-hate relationship with life in exurbia and its correlation with my family recently relocating from the quintessential Cincinnati exurb of West Chester, OH (home of Euro style roundabouts and the tallest man made object is the IKEA sign) to the inner I-270 beltway Mayberry (like the 1960s TV show setting) like village of

Glendale, OH a mere eight miles distanced.  I awoke today with an epiphany realizing there is a greater expose story here centered around how the unassuming suburban village of Glendale has played an even greater role in helping to nearly resolve my conflicted war mongering mindset!  I had an epiphany about a weed.I have been in an on-going seven year battle to rid the planet of the vicious wild honeysuckle plant.  This invasive plant has been rumored to have its origins as a souvenir brought home from a vacation to the Orient by a certain senior citizen from Cincinnati.  She apparently loved it for its ornamental landscape nature and planted it in her upscale Hyde Park neighborhood backyard in the 1930s.  From there it grew like a giant green monster spreading across Hamilton County in the 1950s and now it is reported to be found as far away as New York and California!  I become tense and angry whenever I drive the freeways of the region and notice it marching along the right of ways taunting me like some evil green spectre.

When we bought our suburban modified tract home in West Chester in January 2001, it was unbeknownst to me that lurking under the frost and one inch of snow cover in my backyard there was a sleeping troll.   When we sold our previous home in Connecticut, we were left melancholy and longing for a home with a similarly wooded back yard view.  Unfortunately we moved to Cincinnati during the winter in a down market and our choices of “wooded lots” was severely limited, thus we settled on a almost half acre lot with one third of the lot left undeveloped in a sort of mass of what I described as a large cluster of “bushes with occasional trees”.

It was only after our first spring sprang eternal that I realized these bushes were something more than what they seemed.  On the surface I actually quite liked them as they gave off a slightly sweet honey like aroma and were the first plants to sprout leaves in the spring and the last to lose the leaves in the winter (all the way until the week prior to Christmas!).

Yet something was helter skelter about this plant.  The limbs created a cathedral like canopy over the “wooded” area.  The only problem was there was nothing growing under this canopy, save an occasional scrub weed and dirt almost to the degree of being a desert.  This is what set me off to researching, asking neighbors and checking on the internet led me to find out this was an invasive weed of the cruelest nature.You see this plant evolved into what I would describe as the most advanced specialist species on the planet.  Long after the bombs drop and the plague kills us all off and the roaches and rats eventually march into extinction, all that will be left of our beloved planet will be honeysuckle plants growing and “crawling” over every inch of it.  I have a vision of when the aliens finally do come there will not be any place to land and they will simply turn back as the planet will be covered honeysuckle.  Be damned its even too tough for Martians!

I am firmly convinced wild honeysuckle will live on into eternity billions of years from now when our sun burns out into a spec of dust because the honeysuckle actually has outfitted itself to survive anything.  It poisons the earth with a toxin that kills off all other native grass and plants.  Thus that is why the undeveloped “wooded” portion of my backyard lacked any trees.  Only the hardiest and most stoudt seedlings can survive its onslaught of toxins and perpetual shade.  The honeysuckle kills off all competitive plant species!  In the winter the plant produces a sweet berry loved by birds.  They eat it and poop it all over the land, thus spreading the vicious plant hither tither.

The other part of the equation is this plant can’t be simply killed.  I had tried everything that first year we moved to West Chester from sawing, pulling and plucking.  I actually found a pleasure in pulling the small seedlings by hand and I thought, “well this is going to be easy”.  I found the folly of my ways the following spring when all of these plants had not only replaced themselves, but the wild honeysuckle has a troll like way of replacing spent limbs with exponential factors of limbs.  In other words you cut one branch or trunk and in months you will twenty new branchlings sprouting up in all directions.  Soon my pleasure in plucking seedlings became a sick sadistic pleasure in killing and destroying honeysuckle at all cost.  I rented chainsaws and trucks to haul it away and it always grew back. Eventually after six summers I found a suitable solution to killing off the weed (of course we moved a year later) and that was cutting it within inches of the ground and drowning the stump in the herbicide “Roundup”.

Armageddon came one blustery November day in 2008 when I rented a Home Depot truck and armed myself with all manner of machetes, axes and saws.  I spent the day hacking and sawing like a whirling dervish.  I went all out Jedi master on the botanical menace.  The worst part is honeysuckle limbs are sinewy and rubbery, so straight hacking won’t work or else you risk losing limbs from the kick back of your axe or machete.  As a result you have to attack the bigger plants with a saw.  I almost lost a toe in all the hacking and was saved by my steel toed wolverine boots, but I could not escape the numerous scrapes and scratches from the limbs bouncing back at me in a sequenced revenge.  I even lost a good Suunto watch as one of the gaping branches reached for my arm and ripped it clean off my wrist breaking the metal band!  The finale came as I was readying my fourth trip to truck the wasted limbs to the scrap heap when it seemed the honeysuckle called one last favor from mother nature.  The heavens opened up in sheets of rain that came battering down on my last stand.  Eventually on my last trip to the compost site, my twenty dollar an hour Home Depot truck now in its seventh hour got stuck in the mud.  I fortunately found solace in several rogue honeysuckle branches I was able to use under the tire to help get it free.  In the end I stood in front of the cab of the truck looking through the windshield wipers squeaking back and forth as my kids looked on at my mud caked effigy in a gaping awe trying to figure out “is that my dad?”  At that moment I knew I would be a warrior for life fighting to rid the earth of the viral wild honeysuckle and clearing the local land for native species to excel.

So it was not until after moving to Glendale that I was talking to neighbor Jackie Saunders and she explained to me that I had to “let the yard come to me, let it grow and it will tell you what it needs”.  Then I got into an ugly honeysuckle debate with Jackie.  We had honeysuckle plants growing along the fence line bordering our yards.  She defended and I offended.   Not much unlike my wife, Jackie loves honeysuckle.  I tried to tell her what I tell my wife and that is you do not know this plant until you have to actually try to trim it back on a regular basis.  Of course she has been doing this for thirty years.  Jackie tried to make peace on our debate by walking me down the fence line to show me where she actually had “jumped the fence” a year earlier and killed off an infestation of the forerunner to honeysuckle, poison ivy.  Poison ivy is easy.What I have realized since moving to Glendale is that there is a sinister soft underbelly to this otherwise unassuming Mayberry like village of old victorian homes with wide porches.  An ugly secret had been festering here for years.  The villagers embrace honeysuckle.  So much so have the village people of Glendale embraced it that I at first had not noticed it at all until Jackie told shared, “they even maintain honeysuckle as a border along the grounds of the historical homes in the village (center)”.  The next day I drove beyond my cul-de-suc of newer mcmansions and ventured into Glendale proper and yes there it was almost everywhere I looked, along side walks, making borders between homes honeysuckle grown and maintained as a border.  Yes, it did taunt me and flaunt the fact that while I had nearly cleared it all from my West Chester property to the point of pride in all of the new native growth tree saplings, I know had to face the reality that I was living amongst the “enemy”.   After a time I gave in and even began to have the trappings of starting my own committee to petition the village hall to start a new festival every April as a rite of spring passage.  I envisioned the big banner over main street shouting out the “Great Glendale Honeysuckle Fest”.   We would have honeysuckle shucking contest and the “who could find the most uses” for this durable plant specimen.  The winner would probably an eighty year old woman weaving “infinity” baskets made of the venerable honeysuckle plant.  Miss Honeysuckle beauty contest anyone? That was the pinnacle of my madness as alas it all seemed so simple until one recent evening at dusk I reawakened my epiphany and slipped into my backyard along the fence bordering my property and my neighbor and quietly snipped and sawed away several branches of honeysuckle that had gotten out of hand and grown on my side of the fence and I then bathed the stumps in Roundup.  I eventually allowed a peace offering in the form of three individual honeysuckle plants that I have allowed to live along the fence line bordering my neighbor’s property.