John's Three-Leafed Nemesis

Every super hero needs an arch enemy to make them a super hero, right?  I mean, if there was no Gotham City, Batman wouldn't need to exist.

John's nemesis?  Among other things, poison ivy.  He has had a struggle with it our entire marriage, and the battle between the two has existed even before we met.  There are stories of Hugh burning logs with poison ivy on them at Scout camp, and John needing to be hospitalized (?) because the inflammation went down his wind pipe.  He ran into it other times during his childhood, and I think there's an instance of him feeling like he was going insane, sitting in his hot, not air-conditioned bedroom during the summer, with a fan blowing on him to ease the discomfort.

Our first run in with it as a married couple was at our home in Dayton.  Our neighborhood situated the homes on very small lots that backed up to each other.  So at the back of our backyard, we had the backside of the detached garage from the home on the street on the next block.  It was covered in the loveliest curtain of ivy....which upon closer inspection turned out to be poison ivy. John brought home universal protection gear from the hospital and attempted to pull it all down (I'm not sure why we didn't tell the homeowner that they needed to do it themself).  John still ended up with so many patches of poison ivy on his hands and other "places" that male hands touch when, say, using the restroom, that John was fairly miserable for days.

I can't remember any poison ivy in Germany, but it was prevalent in PA.  And once we moved to Dexter, John quickly discovered that it was growing throughout out beautiful, manicured, landscaped front flower beds.  He ended up finding the massive, four foot wide root measuring 100 pounds at least.  We assumed our struggles were over.

Nope.  I'm not sure if it was the pool guy who came to set up our pool in the springtime, or John who noticed it first, but it was growing all along our pool fence.  Turns out, the previous owners had "tried" to get rid of it....but were obviously unsuccessful.

So John, once again, took matters into his own hands.

He did a pretty good job of pulling up a lot of it.  I mean, we don't exactly want the babies pulling out their pool toys and leaving them along the fence and then breaking out the next day when they play with them again.  So he still sprays every couple of weeks, but as in most things with John, he WILL come out the winner, no DOUBT!