Wisteria

It's the small things, I always say, that eat up so much of our time. The little chores and distractions which, when added together, will consume the better part of an hour, an afternoon, or a day.

Take for instance, what happened yesterday. I was out on the deck. Over the deck is the trellis, or arbor, which had been erected some years ago to provide shade on hot afternoons such as this one, of which we do not have many, at least not in this part of northern California, blessed as it is by cooling breezes that come over the coastal range from the Pacific Ocean. But I digress.

Two wisteria bushes have grown up along this trellis and the supporting posts, and their tough tendrils and vines have taken over most of the structure. Though the pretty blue flowers are pleasant to look at when they come out in the spring, they soon give way to a proliferation of rather unpleasant looking pods that hang like pendants from the vines. The pods look like large green pea pods, and often are heavy enough that when they fall, as they do from time to time on an unsuspecting neck or shoulder, the impact can be alarming.

Despite the heat of the day, I decided to remove as many of the pods as my enervated state could withstand, by plucking them down one or two at a time. I had gone through forty or fifty pluckings when I felt a sharp sting in the palm of my hand.

On close examination I found that a tiny splinter, no larger than a fourth of the size of this hyphen - had penetrated the tough (or what I had hitherto regarded as tough) skin of my palm, right there in the Plain of Mars, midway between the Heart Line and the Fate Line.

The splinter evidently came from the protective covering of the wisteria pod, and my mistake was to have grasped the pods without wearing gloves. Miraculously, for all my efforts at denuding the wisteria of its pods, I was pierced only once. In spite of its tiny size, and perhaps because it entered my flesh in a sensitive spot, this tiny splinter is very painful.

I went indoors, found one of my wife's tweezers, and tried to pluck out the offending splinter. It was not an easy job, because I am right-handed, and that was the hand in which the invader was embedded. In the course of several attempts at withdrawing the splinter, I succeeded in breaking it into two parts, and ravaging the skin around the point of entry, to the degree that blood was drawn, and what should have been a minor operation turned out to be more than that. In the end, only about half of the splinter was extracted. Afterwards I applied salve and found a large flesh-colored and rubbery-textured Band-Aid to cover the hideous gash.

The other splinter half is lodged in the palm, where it is likely to remain after the skin heals over it.

The whole point of this story is that an afternoon was wasted by good intentions, acting on an impulse, being sidetracked by an accident, and botching a repair job.