It grows about a foot a day, swallowing barns, fence posts, and the occasional Oldsmobile. The botanists call it invasive. My grandmother called it ambitious. "That vine," she used to say, "has more direction than any man I ever married." She married three.

Kudzu was supposed to save us. The government brought it over from Japan in the 1930s to stop erosion, which is the agricultural equivalent of hiring a fox to guard the henhouse. It stopped the erosion. It also stopped the barns, the fences, the trees, and any illusion we had about controlling nature.

There's a lesson in kudzu, if you're willing to learn it: every solution creates a new problem, every fix needs a fix, and nature doesn't care about your plans. My grandmother knew this. The government didn't. The kudzu knew it best of all.