It begins small—a mass of shoots along the ground, their tendrils angling for fence posts, for trellises, for garden lanterns, for rock outcroppings along creek bottoms. The fevered race is on. Summer sun hotwires their prodigious growth into swirls of greenery that soon become tangled thickets. Occasional breezes whip the gummy tendrils onto still more shrubs or upon whatever lies in their path. In late August clusters of star-shaped flowers feather the tops of these vines, their sugary sweetness intoxicating bees and other insects.

 

 

 

Sweet Autumn Clematis is the name of this perennial.

It seems that gossip has similar characteristics: fiery, infectious, showy, invasive, suffocating. Such psychic darkness lurks beneath the guise of excitement and hilarity and swells the media’s breaking news and ignites lunchrooms. Its fabricators insist that they are in the know, no matter the mangled remains of their prey. The resulting entrapment seems impermeable to change—But not so.

Both tangled vines and gossip are noxious, and harsh measures are needed to destroy them. The first hard frost kills the perennial and reduces its lush foliage to the straggly hairs of a witch hell-bent on escape. And the laser-truth of grace excises the lies from those afflicted and restores their characters, whether still living or deceased.

We have only to wait. Evil has always had short shrift in this world.