I turned the top of the hedge into a hobbyhorse. I could walk back and forth on top of it. I burrowed deep through it to make little secret rooms, and tunnels, which only I could find, connecting our property to the neighbors’. I spent whole days lost in that hedge. If I didn’t want to be found, it was my perfect refuge. And I loved seeing how old, woody ivy forms different kinds of leaves from young ivy vines: they’re less variegated, less pointy, and thicker. They’re more primitive—like what I imagine vine leaves would want to be when they grow up. Oh, and the ivy would squeeze out branching clusters of sweet, tiny flowers from its oldest parts, too. That’s when I knew the hedge was happiest.
I wasn’t entirely alone in there. Opossums and raccoons used it as a way station, but never moved in. Maybe it was the presence of all my piss—or the cat’s. We never liked each other. Birds nested here and there, an old tortoise appeared out of nowhere once and made a kind of dirt nest at one end. He hung around a few years because I fed him iceberg lettuce, but then he disappeared. Years later I found out that my dad had found him, flattened like a crusty pancake out on the big street beyond our lane, and buried him, but didn’t have the heart to tell me. I always thought the old guy had made it through the new subdivisions, up to the last open hills between our house and Saddleback Mountain.
The only plant collaborators the ivy allowed were some spindly pole-like trees I never saw anywhere else in our area. They were weed-like, propagated by aggressive roots meandering under the soil, and always tried to make little groves throughout our yard.
You could really see Momma tree and all her babies trailing off along some root line. Usually we jammed over the little ones with the lawn mower. Even when the ivy killed off everything else, those trees would push right up through the thickest part of it. They were odd trees: leafy way up on top all summer, with big, soft, fernlike leaves, each having two long, parallel rows placed on either side of stiff, two-foot-long fronds. And in California, where there isn’t much seasonal change, they’d truly make the fall, by turning bright yellow overnight and dropping every single thing—leaves, fronds, and all. Then for a couple months there’d just be pale gray trunks—some no thicker than broom handles; others as thick as your leg, poking up from the green ivy and rising sometimes fifty feet in the air.
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