mysterious creepy things

The two tiny sprigs of stolen ivy I planted on the north side of the house grew into an immense and frightening mass of green in only five years. Light from the north windows vanished and the center of the house was always gloomy. There are roses also growing on that north side, and they were struggling, strangled as they were by the thuggish, clinging ivy.

It didn't even quit, this monstrous stuff, when it reached the top of the chimney. Part headed west and slithered into the attic vent where the leafless albino vines wrapped around the rafters, burrowed beneath the insulation. Most of the remainder went airborne, waving about in mid-air like Medusa's snakes, while a single less adventurous branch headed east to mount an attack on the golden honeylocust. I swear I could hear it sometimes at night, whispering along the bricks.

I hate thuggish things, plants that know no boundaries, respect nothing, advance with too much vigor, pushing aside less vital, more delicate green things. We got out the ladders, rakes, clippers, gloves, saws. I tucked my fear of heights in my back pocket and crept up the ladder to rip the tendrils from the brick, yank it out of the attic, off the poor, ailing honeylocust.


A massive wall of ivy was the last to come down. It was all in one piece and when we succeeded in loosening its grip on the chimney it came down to reveal (of course) still more vines and also something horrid, something nesty, creepy, filled with fuzz and gloves.

Whatever the hell lived here, it stole all of my garden gloves and tucked them into this nest thing, this huge nest thing stuffed about 10' up from the ground in the bend of the chimney. I counted 12 pair of those brown wear-them-out, throw-them-away garden gloves. I remembered that last year I'd lost a package of them. Apparently not. Some kind of thief, some creature. Don't think it's birds. Do you think it could be rats? Squirrels? Don't like it. Creepy. Gone now, but still creepy, because now it's homeless.