Vines

     I have a whole tangle of vinca vines and ivy on the back deck and the front porch and in places in the house. They seem to grow down and up, that they dangle and intertwine. Sometimes, on our kitchen window ledge they interfere with the dishes I am washing or even stubbornly try to burrow their way into the wall. But they are pretty and  they mix and mingle and so they stay.

     They call to mind a moment from Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. The main character, Taylor, uses a plant to try to explain something to her adopted daughter, Turtle. She speaks about wisteria and about the community they had become part of and helped to create, this odd little patchwork of folk. Kingsolver writes, "Wisteria vines, like other legumes, often thrive in poor soil...Their secret is something called rhizobia. These are microscopic bugs that live underground in little knots on the roots. They suck nitrogen gas right out of the soil and turn it into fertilizer for the plant.  "It's like this," I told Turtle. "There's a whole invisible system for helping out the plant that you'd never guess was there. It's just the same as with people. The way Edna has Virgie and Virgie has Edna and Sandi has Kid Central Station and everyone has Mattie" (Kingsolver 212).

     I smile looking at the plants that frame the window and think of the invisible systems that prop me up.  Their roots, though slender, run deep.