Fall colors

I am no expert on poison oak, since it grows mainly in the Pacific Northwest, where I often visit but seldom traipse. Poison ivy, now that's a different story. Whenever traveling east I start watching for it to appear about the same time the trees come into view...Minnesota in the north, eastern Oklahoma in the center and eastern Texas down low. I am seldom disappointed. Vine or bush, waxy green, sometimes with berries and sometimes not, it thrives over most of the eastern US. Healthy, I call it, for it almost never looks undernourished.

Owing to a number of miserable encounters with this uncontrolled substance as a youth I learned, out of absolute necessity, to identify what I am sure is one of Satan's favorite play things. Stay away from it is the only solution, for once its active ingredient, urushiol, contacts the skin an allergic reaction is almost certain. Unless of course, you just don't get poison ivy, in which case you are excused.

Like other foliage, poison ivy is deciduous and turns beautiful colors in the fall. But unlike other leaves, you can look, but you'd better not touch.