{"id":166464,"date":"2024-01-08T10:16:05","date_gmt":"2024-01-08T15:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=166464"},"modified":"2024-01-08T10:16:05","modified_gmt":"2024-01-08T15:16:05","slug":"ripping-ivy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/01\/08\/ripping-ivy\/","title":{"rendered":"Ripping Ivy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Ivy. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons,<\/a> licensed under CCO 2.0.<\/p><\/div>\n

When we moved into our little house, the large beds of English ivy in the front yard didn\u2019t bother me much. It\u2019s not what I would have chosen\u2014who would choose an invasive species?\u2014but my spouse and I agreed we would come up with a Yard Plan and make strategic choices, slowly and deliberately, including eradicating the ivy. Getting rid of ivy is notoriously difficult\u2014my mom warned me it\u2019s \u201cbackbreaking work.\u201d I was also, when we moved in, finishing a book project, then in its sixth year and finally arriving at the fact-checking stage. The ivy project existed in the future.<\/p>\n

One day, in a stolen moment of daylight, I was sitting around in our front yard with my spouse and small childwhen I noticed a little ivy creeper reaching out, venturing beyond its bed into the grass. The beds were bad enough as it was, but they certainly could not be permitted to grow. So, I grabbed it and pulled. It did not yield. Tough guy, huh? I regripped and pulled harder, and it popped out of the ground, spraying dry dirt in my face. I was elated. I had contained the ivy. I grabbed another vine and pulled.<\/p>\n

That was the beginning. From that moment forward, all I wanted to do was rip ivy out of the ground. The ivy beds were just outside my office window, and I knew they were sending out their little traveler vines and growing their territories whenever I looked away. I started ripping ivy while the baby napped. I started ripping ivy while on calls with editors and sources. I\u00a0invited a neighbor who had (in my defense, unknown-to-me) back problems to come over and rip ivy with me as a social engagement.\u00a0(She joined me, and hurt her back.)<\/p>\n

Ivy\u2019s\u00a0presence in a yard is binary: all of it has to go, or those green leaves will spring back up at the next rain. I heard this time and again from neighbors who wandered by as I hunched over my work; it seemed everybody had an ivy-pulling story. One couple stopped repeatedly to tell me that ivy is the work of the Devil. A man took pains to tell me I would never win\u2014it would just come back again. Okay, I said. We\u2019ll see, I thought.<\/p>\n

I began to develop my own ivy-pulling techniques: I would pull up on the easy, thin, green traveler vine to see where it came from, what larger root system sponsored it. Usually it intersected with another vine cluster. If I was feeling aggressive I would rip them both out at once with my bare hands. I used clippers to chop through any roots too thick to pull. When I pulled an especially long vine and root system out, it would snap in the air like a whip. Then I would break it in half and throw it on the enormous and growing pile of my dead.<\/p>\n

I started seeing ivy tangles when I closed my eyes, ivy in my dreams. Late at night, without the option to do my work (pulling ivy), I had to focus on my real work, the enormous pile of unchecked facts, the documents that needed scanning, the sources who needed calling yet again. I had expected fact-checking to be a phase of delegation after I hired a fact-checker, but in fact I had to spend quite a lot of time preparing, organzing, in order for her to be able to work. How were these facts so unruly?<\/p>\n

Slowly, over the course of three months, the ivy beds shrank. My misplaced diligence had a tangible effect: I was winning. I got sunburned, my hands blistered, and my back did start to hurt, but: I won. The ivy has not come back. The battle with the facts ended, too: my book was published in March of 2022, and I’m not going to say more about that because I don’t want to jinx it.<\/p>\n

And so our yard is ivy-less. But I honestly miss the job. Without facts to check or vines to pull, I have felt a little lost, a little aimless. Unmoored. When I take walks in the park, I very casually rip out the vines intruding on the pathway as I breeze by; I eye my neighbors\u2019 yards of complacent ivy with anxious, compulsive envy and wonder how weird it would be to offer help. Every once in a blue moon, from somewhere underground, a little ivy creeper will spring up on the edges of my yard. I am always elated to see it; it feels like running into a long-lost friend. I jump to rip it out.<\/p>\n

Mary Childs is a host of NPR\u2019s Planet Money podcast, and the author of <\/em>The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All, \u00a0from Flatiron Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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