Bindweed

to wake him and scolds, "The grease from your hair will soil that fabric." I wonder what he dreamed of? Twelve years ago, I was fresh out of college and worked as a legal secretary in a small mining community. My "office" had a pea-green metal desk and file cabinet, a worktable made from a discarded plywood door, and a small imitation wood cabinet whose sliding doors were reversed so that every time you opened them your fingers got smashed. The view from my single, narrow, cracked window was of two old houses dating back to the late 1800s. One of them was barely visible because of the overgrown, bug-infested shrubbery . The other house had a beautiful bay window upstairs, dressed with sheer, white lace curtains. Whenever I looked at the bay window, those curtains would almost send a whiff of freshness to overshadow the stench emanating from the passing coal trucks. About the same time I bought the new, ripple-designed, cream-colored sofa I rented an upstairs room above a bakery out in the country. The aroma from the bakery drifted upstairs every morning— cinnamon buns, blueberry muffins, chocolate tortes, and a variety of freshbrewed coffees. The owners were a young, adventurous couple in their early thirties who decided to move from the overcrowded city to Bluegrass country. They used only pure ingredients and baked their tempting pastries in an early clay oven, fueled by a massive fireplace. The single window in my room occupied almost the entire wall, so that the early morning sun bathed me in its warmth. The view encompassed open, luscious green, rolling hills, strewn with cream-colored sheep, honeysuckle bushes, and a clear, sparkling, flowing creek. Bindweed "Si^c years' deep cultivation is necesary to contain it." By August, the peonies support its knot and swirl, smothered armatures of stem and leaf-twist, bloom's dull litter, while even the fence, occupied, blares the white and midday trumpets of its rank advance. All summer I attack, root-hacking, unraveling its green emplacements, sacking its seeds and burning them. First frost, not my sallies, finally drives it back. So come November, we retreat to our places, I to my hothouse bivouac at the field's edge, bindweed to its great cold hall of hardpan. There it toughens, gathering strength in the dark, while the blood of my resolve, thinned in winter's contemplative light, grows wisely thin. -Richard Hague 52 ...