“Hey,” said she, touching the inside of her forearm. “What do you think this is?”

It was a nasty red rash shaped more or less like the state of South Carolina.

“I’d say poison ivy,” I said, being something of an expert on the subject. When I was a kid, after all, I always seemed to get poison ivy around my ankles and arms at least once a summer, until I weirdly became immune to it. My crazy great aunt Lily informed me this was due to the fact that her mother, my great grandmother “Aunt Emma,” was a Cherokee Indian lady and therefore I was growing into my “wild Indian blood” and was thus naturally immune to poisonous plants and most bug bites. This is the same delightfully daffy auntie who told me she sang with Al Jolson on a Washington stage and that Ed Sullivan sometimes phoned her after his Sunday night TV show. Who knows, maybe he did. She was the family’s original wild Lily, a wisp of a girl from Raleigh who shocked her Baptist family in the 1920s by running off to perform in vaudeville.

In any case, the very words “poison ivy” brought a stricken look to my bride’s lovely face.

“Oh, wow, I hope not. I’m unbelievably susceptible to that stuff.” Whereupon she related a quick and painful story about being so covered with a poison ivy rash one summer during her teenage years on Long Island, she was forced to get a cortisone shot just to ease the misery.

By day two, the rash had spread to both arms and was threatening her elbows. By day three it was forging new ground on her stomach.

“For the life of me I can’t figure out how I’ve gotten it,” she fretted. “I haven’t seen poison ivy growing anywhere in our yard or been anywhere near the woods.”

And with this my gaze fell on Mulligan the dog.

The Mull, as we call her, really does have wild Indian blood. To briefly review, I found her galloping along the highway in Aberdeen some years ago and brought her home, a dusty but joyful black pup with soulful brown eyes, a grateful jewel of a dog that had either run away or been dumped by the side of the road. She was maybe two months old and all skin and bones, had clearly been scavaging her supper in the woods and dining on rabbits and birds. Within a year, though, she’d grown into a sleek and beautiful flat-haired retriever – maybe the nicest dog I’ve ever owned. Unquestionably the smartest.

But as Crazy Aunt Lily used to say of me: Once wild, always wild. The Mull likes to chase the deer that hop our backyard fence to munch on my carefully cultivated hosta and daylily beds, a battle I was winning thanks to The Mull until I noticed a large shrub of some kind that had sprouted like a fountain at the bottom of our yard. A day or two after the Big Itch struck, I moseyed down and was horrified to behold the mothership of all poison oak plants rising from an old tree stump.

This evil three-leafed fountain of human misery was perhaps four feet high and 12 feet in circumference, strategically positioned where The Mull – in noble defense of the realm, ever vigilant against the rapacious invaders – would invariably brush its insidious leaves as she performed her duties. In fact, I recall recently watching The Mull actually leap the aforementioned monster plant in an effort to cut off a fleeing offender. I also recalled a vet who explained that a dog’s fur is an excellent carrier of infectious oils like that emitted by poison oak.

What followed late Sunday afternoon was a two-hour fight to the finish between Man and Plant. Armed with a rusty sling blade, shovel and hoe and a gallon of herbicide from Aberdeen Feed, I hacked the mothership of misery to pieces and doused the stump and remaining shoots of ivy with Round-up. Then I raked up the leaves into a pile and gave them a good dousing for good measure, leaving them to wither and die. Unfortunately, as I put away the tools, I was startled to turn around and find The Mull rolling in the sprayed remains of the offending plant. Once wild, always wild – though evidently not half as smart as I’ve come to believe.

The Mull and her cronies, the golden retrievers, wound up getting a serious soap and scrub down worthy of drug dealers in a a federal lockup.

“That should take care of it,” I assured the itchy wife, whose arms were alarmingly red and blotchy and was now more or less bathing in Calamine and cortisone.

“Aren’t you worried that you’ll contract it?” she asked.

“Wild Indian blood,” I said. “Not a problem.”

Silly me.

Four days later, I was sitting in a meeting with a city arts council director when my left ankle began to itch. I didn’t think too much about it until I saw the red bumps.

Could be revenge of the Mothership, too.

If The Mull’s not as smart as I think, alas, perhaps my blood is not as wild or Indian as thought.

In any case, I’ve been discreetly scratching ever since, watching little islands of red colonize my elbows and forearms, bloom behind my right knee and on top of my left foot. Call me crazy as Aunt Lily but I’m rather curious to see how far it goes before I lose my mind and start talking to Al Jolson at night or waiting for Ed Sullivan to phone.

The itchy wife, meanwhile, wisely got herself a shot in the rump and is taking some kind medication that appears to be clearing up her skin.

Life is settling down again. The Mull remains ever vigilant and summer looms.

Pardon me while I go have a quiet little scratch.

As apricot light gives way to twilight blue, it is as if the world is exhaling from a tough day in traffic or the fatigue of family vacation. Work in the garden is over. The porch swing creaks. Venus rides low in the east, the first stars visible. And oh, look — the summer’s first fireflies are out, too. The sprinkler bursts on and hisses. The cat pads home. Neighborhood sounds seem close enough to touch. Somewhere a screen door slaps shut, a woman laughs, a guitar is being played, a bath is being run, dinner served, a candle lit, wine poured, prayers said.

On such an evening, one can be forgiven the folly of thinking you just may live forever, or at least long enough to see the Blue Mosque and the Ganges at sunset.

A fine summer evening makes one briefly think all things are possible, that there is still time enough left to actually do it, that there is really no such thing as old because you can almost reach out and touch your vanished childhood. Just yesterday you were sitting in the highest seat on the Ferris wheel when it stopped to let others on, granting you both a perfect view of everything. You longed to take her hand because her hair smelled like Prell and tangerines.

Hot summer nights, mid-July

When you and I were forever wild,

The crazy days, the city lights,

The way you’d play with me like a child.

The opening lines of Lana Del Rey’s soulful “Young and Beautiful,” the theme song from Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, express this Pyrrhic hunger for life and experience quite nicely, even though the movie itself was something of an untidy mess, not unlike the author’s own life. Will you still love me, she laments, when I’m no longer young and beautiful?

Poets and children have always found summer evenings irresistible fare. In his mesmerizing novella Enchanted Night, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Steven Millhauser creates an entire New England town bewitched by the supernatural power of high summer darkness. Under the influence of a full moon, children in a small Connecticut town are drawn from their beds while their abandoned stuffed animals come to life in attics across town. A gang of teenage girls roams the streets breaking into homes to steal refrigerator magnets and toothbrushes, leaving giddy notes that declare, “We are your daughters!” A store mannequin comes to life in search of love; an insomniac novelist finally leaves his mother’s house to engage in a debate about existence; and an introverted girl bathes in the moonlit surf. For anyone who has been bored by summer’s sweltering sameness, Millhauser’s evocation of a world that comes alive at dusk with secret desires and unexplored passions is nothing shy of an invitation to surrender to bittersweet imagination. Centuries before, Shakespeare worked this same turf to great effect when he made summer night dreams a fine mad romp of confused love that vanished with the morning light.

When I was young, my older brother Dickie and I seemed to live out of doors all summer. Our feet were always dirty. We ran wild through the neighborhood, or I did anyway, damming creeks and making forts where I sat on the bank and and read Classics Illustrated and dreamed of living in England. I rode my bike all over God’s green acre pretending I was there already, pedaling like an orphanage runaway down a hedgerow lane, eager to escape the gravity of my sleepy Southern life any way possible.

Henry James may truly have believed that the two most beautiful words in the English language were “summer afternoon,” but they felt bone-lonely and unbearably endless to me in my solitary outdoor boyhood, the reason I later took to golf and camping and mowing lawns. Our father was a newspaper man who moved us to four different places in the old Confederacy during the first seven years of my life, which left me with few, if any, playmates — I remember exactly none before about age 7 — but left me free to roam at will, read books and comics, explore old sheds and conduct the Punic Wars with my painted Greek and Roman soldiers in the cool dirt beneath whatever fan-cooled house we were living in. Our mother was a former beauty queen who’d lost a second baby not long ago; she sometimes napped in the long afternoons while our maid, Jesse May Richardson, ironed my father’s shirts in the kitchen, humming to the gospel tunes she dialed up on the small transistor radio in the kitchen window, the tap water in her Coca-Cola bottle sloshing back and forth as she sprinkled the fabric and sang about flying away to Jesus.

After Vacation Bible School was over, if I pestered hard enough, Miss Jesse May sometimes let me tag along with her to do the weekly shopping at the Piggly Wiggly, which was the only place in town fully air conditioned — Do step inside where it’s . . . coooool, read the sign in the front window, showing a friendly penguin with a jaunty cap. Miss Jesse May didn’t believe in dawdling and had complete authority over my personal affairs. “Don’t you dare let me catch them sandals off your feet,” she instructed firmly before briskly setting off for the vegetable aisle. “And don’t let me learn you’ve made a whisker of trouble in this store.”

I rarely made trouble, per se, sometimes just making temporary “king seats” out of the flour sacks in the baking aisle. But trust me when I tell you I never failed to shuck those sorry Vacation Bible School sandals faster than you could say “Martha White Self-Rising Flour,” just to slide my bare hot and dirty feet over those cool air-conditioned floor tiles for a blissfully rebellious moment or two before Miss Jesse May came wheeling around the aisle looking as unimpressed as a concrete Jesus.

It was only summer evenings that made this life half-tolerable, or so I thought at the time. The whole world seemed to change for the better as the shadows on the lawn lengthened and the hot light of South Carolina kindly expired its term. My father came home with a loosened necktie and made highballs for himself and my mother. They sat and talked beneath the slowly turning ceiling fan on the wraparound porch. I remember the powerful smell of honeysuckle out there, caladiums big as dinner plates, maybe even gardenia in bloom. More than once after supper was cleared away, before she went home to a separate life I knew nothing about, Miss Jesse May dialed up a jackleg rockabilly station from Sumter and taught me to “feet dance” by placing my bare feet on top of her fleshy ones and shimmying across the floor. My mother sometimes joined in, almost her old self again. My father just grinned like a fool, standing in the kitchen doorway. He had wooden feet, my mother joked. “All two of them.”

Miss Jesse May passed away just weeks before we moved home to Greensboro, where my father’s people went back for generations. As I recall, we were the only white folks at her funeral. Because of her, my mother became a very fine Southern cook and crack gardener, and I learned to dance and like fancy gospel music.

That next summer we took our first family vacation to the beach, putting up at the rustic Seaside Club, where we used to go when my father worked at the paper in Wilmington. Summer evenings took on a whole new cast after that. The adults gathered on the porches, whiskey sours and cheap wine in hand, telling jokes we weren’t permitted to hear, raucous laughter from the upper porch, women in sundresses with sunburned shoulders.

A new tribe of kids took me into their ranks. They came from everywhere — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Chapel Hill. I saw them — a few, anyway — for six straight summers. We roamed the beach at dusk, hooting and pretending to be big trouble; ogled gutted sand sharks hung up like Mussolini and his mistress on the pier; and snuck up sandy stairways into the vast dim ballroom at Lumina Pavillion to watch older teenagers dance and make out. Somewhat later, I saw my first naked woman – other than my mother – through a convenient knot-hole my buddy Brad found in the pine wall of the women’s dressing room beneath the Seaside Club. That same week I gigged my first flounder in the evening flats off Bald Head Island, in those days just a sea-washed island with its lonely nonworking lighthouse, reached only by skiff with a wheezing outboard. At age 13, the last summer we stayed at the Seaside Club, there were fireworks on the Fourth and I kissed my first non-relative girl, if you don’t count my girl cousin Teddy back in Greensboro. This girl’s name was Candy. She was from Xenia, Ohio, a town obliterated that next spring by a terrible tornado. I stared at the unbelievable photos in Time magazine and never heard from her again. She wrote me twice before the twister struck, but I never wrote back.

They say your life is shaped by the people and places of your first ten years of life. If that’s true, and I believe it is, I am seriously beholden to Jesse May Richardson and those long summer evenings when I learned to feet dance and love gospel music and the coolness of dusk lit by fireflies. I am indebted to the Seaside Club and my roaming beach tribe and to Brad and his naked woman and to Candy the pretty girl I kissed but never had the courage to write.

Summer may end too soon. But summer evenings, I have grown to believe, like a love of gardening and good Southern cooking, must stay with a soul forever.

Frankly, this was not at all the answer I expected. So I asked her what, if anything, she feared. She gave me a pleasant smile.

“Not much. Just falling down and Republicans.”

At the time I thought she was joking. My dad was a Republican and I was one of those kids who was forever falling down, tripping over things or taking hard spills in sports. I had scars from all kinds of injuries all over my body — bruises, cuts, gouges and sprains of every sort. Once, in a Little League game, I slid home and caught the catcher’s spike just above my left eye, nearly putting my eye out. My ever-anxious mother called me “Hurricane Jimmy” because she never knew what physical disaster I would bring home next.

It wasn’t too long after this, in fact, that I crashed through a snow barrier on a ski slope in western Maryland and spent a New Year’s Eve in a Catholic hospital with my right knee in a sling. Even then, falling down didn’t really pain much more than my ego.

A few years later, I tried out for my college football team with a group of other misguided freshmen and wound up tearing the cartilage in my right knee, requiring surgery that put me on crutches the first three weeks of my college life.

Even then, it didn’t slow me down much. A year later, playing in an intramural basketball game, I reinjured the same knee and needed a second surgery to repair the damage.

During my seven years working on a magazine in Atlanta, I coached a Little League team and played on two different softball teams and was forever nursing or icing down a sore muscle somewhere on my body. In a regular winter basketball league at the downtown YMCA, I sprained an ankle so badly it haunts me to this day.

During the 1980s and 90s, that “trick” ankle popped out of joint at least a dozen times, causing me to fall down in some of the most embarrassing situations. I once fell down the crowded steps of the Louvre Museum in Paris, parting a group of senior citizens like bowling pins. They thought I’d either been shot or was dying of a heart attack.

Still, Hurricane Jimmy didn’t slow down much.

I simply wore a brace on the left ankle and right knee and taught myself to walk a little like a duck on uneven pavement to avoid sudden unexpected spills. A surgeon who examined both bad wheels suggested I just take up swimming and skip the sports meant for guys with fewer years and better wheels.

Through my 40 and 50s, I hiked and camped and climbed mountains with buddies, fly-fished in the New England river and carried my golf bag all over the links of Scotland, England and Ireland. I also cleared a five-acre forest on a Maine hilltop, rebuilt a century-old stone wall and added a large faux English garden in the woods. By then, both knees and ankles would swell, but a long soak in our six-foot claw-foot bathtub with a cold Sam Adams was basically all I needed to soothe the pains.

Climbing Mount Katahdin in Maine with my teenage son around my 51st birthday was truly when I realized the jig was up, that I was slowing down. I made it a quarter of a mile from the peak before I sat down on a boulder and declared my intention to simply wait and observe the beautiful autumn afternoon while my son and his buddies scampered on up the “Razor’s Edge” trail to the top on the mountain on their young goat legs.

I remember thinking — for the first time in years — about Grandmother Taylor’s funny remark about falling down and Republicans.

There are compensations, of course, for physically slowing down in life. You begin to notice more of the passing landscape and appreciate how far you’ve traveled, even on dodgy wheels.

During the past decade, knock wood, I’ve had only one serious fall, but one that really hurt. While my wife was off at the farmers market one Saturday morning, I stupidly attempted to carry a monstrously heavy concrete planter across our wet backyard terrace and wound up planted on my rear end with a right knee that buckled, but mercifully didn’t break. My legs and arm muscles were sore for days, but the real damage was to the end of my middle left-hand finger, which got crushed and required medical attention after the planter crashed down on it.

The finger tip grew back. But Hurricane Jimmy finally got the message: the older he gets, the stronger he used to be.

My wife refuses to let me work in the back yard now without proper adult supervision. The dog doesn’t count.

Just to complicate matters, since last May I’ve been limping on a sore left knee that was injured while playing golf with my son on a famous links course on Long Island. It was a day I wouldn’t trade for anything, though.

It seemed like the simplest of injuries, no big deal at first, a strained knee that resulted when the sand in a bunker shifted.

But a torn meniscus in my one remaining “good” knee resulted. Doc tells me I’m too young yet for new knees, so I’ve been limping along, letting it heal on its own, doing some physical therapy and exercise to try rebuilding the knee’s strength.

I’m OK with shifting to a slower gear. This life has passed so swiftly.

If you ask me what I fear these days, I’d have to say not all that much except falling asleep during a good movie, possibly all Republicans and Democrats.

Which is why I’ll be limping slowly to the ballot box.