I’m Fixing to Open My Window

I’m fixing to open my window.

One reason is to let some cool air into the room without having to pay the power company to pump it in via my air conditioning unit, which survived the wave of thievery upon them this summer. When it’s a muggy 110 degrees outside, I protect my air conditioning unit as well as I would my first-born child.

Keeping the murderous heat out and the soothing cool air in is not the only reason I keep my windows closed in the summer. The main reason is to keep the kudzu from creeping in through an open window during the night and strangling me while I sleep.

The vines grow as much as a foot a day, and if it had already crept up to my window’s edge and I slept until noon, it would surely get me. I would be a goner. My survivors would probably find me several days later mummified inside many layers of kudzu vines.

Some folks think kudzu is native to the South because it covers over seven million acres smothering trees, utility poles, fields, gullies, forests, fences, barns, sheds, railroad tracks and anything else that’s left untended for two days.

But it’s not a native plant at all. No, sir! It was introduced in our country by our government when they celebrated the Centennial Exposition in 1876, and invited the Japanese to exhibit it as a plant for ornamental purposes, and that’s when it started.

By the 1920s plant nurseries were selling kudzu plants through the mail all over the Southeast, claiming it could be used for forage for goats. And goats did eat it, but then we all know that a goat will eat anything, even an old rusty tin can if that’s all it can find.

Then in the 1930s the government got involved again through the Soil Conservation Service by promoting kudzu as an erosion control method. They even went so far as hiring hundreds of young men to travel across the south planting the soon to be scourge through the Civilian Conservation Corps. Sorry young ladies, but nobody hired young women back then.

Still thinking they knew what was best, and utilizing some of the most brilliant scholars who had never worked in the real world, in the 1940s the government continued its efforts to help people they thought were unable to help themselves by paying as much as eight dollars an acre to get farmers to plant fields of the kudzu vine to control erosion.

Of course the media went right along with the government and declared that kudzu had replaced cotton as king in the South. Many articles were written in newspapers and the virtues of kudzu were broadcast over the radio, and Kudzu Clubs were started all across the South to honor what was being called the miracle vine.

Finally, in 1953, the government stopped advocating the use of kudzu. Now I don’t know this to be a fact, but I heard it was because newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower, while traveling through Georgia during one of his campaigns, had gone to a barbecue and later found his car had been consumed by kudzu vines.

Then in 1972 the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared kudzu to be a weed! It only took the government 96 years to realize they were wrong!

But you know how we Southerners are, we are resourceful and will make do with what we got. So there are folks who make excellent baskets out of dried kudzu vines. Some people market kudzu products including kudzu blossom jelly and syrup, and even books have been written about it. Other folks make deep-fried kudzu leaves, kudzu quiche, and many other kudzu dishes. But I haven’t seen any kudzu food franchises jumping up.

The main thing I see about kudzu is that it is like government regulations, in that it covers up and smothers things, restricts the growth and even kills proven crops. And you can’t be fixing to kill it.