Oh my creeping fig. It was so beautiful. It grew luxuriously and spread across the shingles of my old house like a cool green blanket. It absorbed the powerful rays of the sun that shown down on the hot summer days — days that were 112 degrees at 10 a.m. Those rays that heated the redwood skeleton, a hundred years old, radiating through lathe and plaster and pulsing until sundown, when finally the pressure fizzled out with the approaching cool darkness of the night.
“You better get rid of it,” my neighbor counseled me. “My house was covered with it and it destroyed the shingles. We had to have all the shingles replaced, and it was so expensive!”
I looked across the street at the house directly across from mine, built around the same time. Old photos, taken before the house was burned to the ground by an angry drug dealer, showed a small, quaint cottage covered in beautiful dark ivy. It was a fairytale cottage before the fire, but now it sat modernized — the weathered old shingles replaced with new beige siding, windows of vinyl, and hollow doors. Perfectly modern and functional. The creeping fig, now a distant memory. The bones of charm were still there, but who knew when or if ever someone would be willing to revive it.
I didn't want the fig to ruin my shingles. I had seen how they secreted a fluid as strong as superglue. Once it attached, the vine could not undo its own cement. As a branch of the plant was pulled away, paint and sometimes wood would come with it. I could just let it be, and meld with the house — allow it to have its symbiotic relationship with the old shingles and stucco.
I looked at my house and saw the tree-like plant ascending the stucco of the front porch and spreading around my front door and windows. It lent an old English vibe to my little cottage. The birds loved it too, and had made a nest just above the entry of the porch. When we came out the front door, they would quickly jet away until we were gone and the coast was clear. Eventually, small lantern-shaped pods sprung free from the clusters of small, dark leaves. I'd seen these in vintage paintings of foliage and fruit — so this is where they came from.
It was lovely. It cooled the house and the birds loved it. So, I kept it.
It grew thick and dark and spread down the sides of the house. The house was cooler, and my electric bill was so much lower, the year before I trimmed it back to paint the house. Eventually, I had to paint the house, and the painter assured me, “I can't paint beneath those vines.”
Only the twisted root jutted from the soil now. It looked like a miniature haunted tree from Grimms' fairytales — gnarled little arms that were once the platform for a vine that had covered an area at least a thousand times its size. A tiny green leaf was starting to emerge from the back. The vine was alive, and hadn't given up. I felt triumphant and hopeful that a new vine would soon be complementing the new paint.