Here’s a neighborhood landmark, located on the corner of the street above mine. For a long time, no one’s paid it much heed; the sign’s been “just part of the landscape.” Until just the other day. I drove by, glanced to the right—and saw that the sign stood alone.
That is, the sign’s still there but the plume of ivy has been cut. Chopped.

To me, the ivy plume had become something of a personal icon. Possessively, I thought of both components as rather like an old-fashioned name for an English pub: The Sign and Ivy. For it sometimes used to be, and perhaps still is somewhere, that not only was an English pub a local landmark, but also that people had their pubs, their preferred places to relax and socialize. The name of the place identified, or at least located you, perhaps as much as your actual address or occupation or status.

My local pub, or its display sign, was prosaic, really. Within a perforated metal shaft about twelve feet high, ivy had burst out from on top of a “Two Hour Parking” sign. I’d long worried that someone would lop it off in the interests of neatness and pruning.
I covered the ivy’s progress as though I were a photojournalist, even a parent watching the growth of a long-desired child, though of course, I can’t supply a date of birth. The ivy started reaching upward months before I first noticed, months of invisibility and darkness before the “baby” met the light of day.

Just think of the long toil, that dark journey, how the plant stretched up toward the light! Compared with its sibling sprouts in the surrounding ground cover, this ivy went wild, even rogue, in a way the property owner never foresaw, let alone planned. Truly this was an excelsior plant. And its plume-like emergence might even be thought of as a kind of second birth, which is why I see the whole assemblage as a personal symbol.

For until about the last ten or fifteen years, I consider myself to have lived a “straight-up” life. Education, marriage, family, part-time career as a musician: I’ve been fortunate indeed but feel that I’ve lived rather conventionally. Now, having claimed and fully entered the roles of writer and photographer, I feel more alive than ever before: like the vine, I have busted out all over! Every day, or at least some part of it, I create what I work on; thus I see that leafy, rangy, unpruned stem of leaves as my spirit. Like Cyrano de Bergerac’s “white plume,” the ivy stands for me. My panache, a symbol of selfhood.

In addition, I am doing this at a time in life when most people consider themselves retired, a state and concept I refuse to take on. At seventy-seven, I give thanks that I am able to function and grow. Seeing the ivy gives me the sense that I can do anything. As though the sprout above, poking out on yet another essay up toward the light, were an invitation to aim high and keep going: Come on by The Sign and Ivy! Bloomers welcome here.

I’ll keep coming.