Honeysuckle Lessons

While taking a walk with a neighbor yesterday, we passed a mass of thick green growth overwhelming a cinderblock wall, and she wondered what it was.  I told her it was honeysuckle.  And, bam - my brain shot backwards in time and a stream of childhood memories  erupted about my Uncle Louie and what I now call his "honeysuckle lessons."

Uncle Louie was one of those quiet characters in my big-chaotic-Irish-Catholic family childhood whose impact was subtle but memorable even these 50 years later.  Uncle Louie has epilepsy - for which treatments did not exist in the mid-50's to 60's.  He's still alive at a ripe old age in the 90's, a credit to the care and loving attention he's received all that time (not to mention his Irish genes!).  But, I'm thinking Uncle Louie gave more than got.

As an adult, he would be shunted around the families of his seven siblings, spending weeks or months at a time at their homes, doing odd chores, as no one would hire an epileptic and he certainly couldn't drive.  When he came to our house in the summer times, his "odd chore" was usually pulling honeysuckle from the fence.  Yes, it's as nasty a job as it sounds.  We had a big full acre yard in the relatively rural suburbs of Washington DC, completely surrounded by chainlink fence about 4 feet tall.  Honeysuckle loved growing on that chainlink, wrapping it's thin stems tenaciously around the wire, and left unchecked could bring a fence down in just a few years.  So, it was an ongoing battle to control it.  The best method was to cut the stems at the ground or spray now-banned chemicals, but you couldn't just rip the stems off the fence as they were wrapped so tightly around the links.  Patient unwinding of the thousands of stems was the only way to get rid of them without bringing the fence down.

Uncle Louie was a tall man, and would sit on a short stool beside the fence, patiently unwinding the honeysuckle from the chainlink, all day, for days on end, with a smile on his face.  His fingers never rushed, and there was never any anger or sulking about the chore.  I'm sure he wished more than once that I would go away, because I'd stand next to him while he worked and ask five million questions like any young girl would.  But his patience, I now know, was extraordinary, as he quietly answered my questions and gave me little nuggets of life lessons to ponder down the road, whilst endlessly unwinding honeysuckle.  And usually, the sneaky guy would get me to first hold a stem for him and then soon my fingers were drawn to unwinding them as we talked.  It's not as much about the words he actually said, but the way he handled himself and his life and the chore.  I guess it's all about time ultimately.  I spent alot of time with Uncle Louie at that chainlink fence seemingly just chatting the day away.

Everybody should have an Uncle Louie.  I hope you did.   I'm so glad I did.  Those honeysuckle lessons will be with me long past any book learning or adult lectures.