Sumacs
My neighbor, outside his house in his driveway with his walker on a sunny day, said the woman who planted the sumacs in his backyard planted them because she thought they were mimosa.
Then a woman came up from the South and said, Those aren't mimosa.
My neighbor said there are three kinds of sumac, one a tree, one a bush, one an herb. Herb? My neighbor said that sumac trees don't live very long – the ones in his backyard won't live very long – because they are a tree that grows in swamps. Swamps? I asked how long the sumacs had been in his yard. He said, Thirty years.
My neighbor is ninety some.
Once when he was a boy scout he went with his troop down to Revenge to camp, and they camped in a grove of poison sumac. But not one boy scout got poisoned. Then they were thirsty and drank from a stream, and no one got sick. But that was a long time ago.
Merry Speece grew up in rural Ohio and presently resides in a town along Lake Erie. At age 16 she fell ill and never recovered; 22 years later, she was diagnosed with ME/CFS. Her writing has appeared in such journals as The Prose Poem Project; Quarter After Eight; Citron Review; Caesurae: The Journal of the Poetry Center of San Jose.
You can see more of Merry's work in 13.4 and 1.2 and 1.2