It looks like it to me. But the reaction to it is purely an "allergic" one, so if you're not in fact allergic to it at all, you'd never know you'd been "exposed" when you had been... And if you live somewhere where it's prevalent, and are over the age of about 6-7, and hadn't been kept indoors constantly by grossly overprotective parents, you'd probably know by now if you
were allergic to it...
I never was, and have still only ever reacted to it once, and that only in my mid-40s, and only after wrapping a long length of it around my forearm and pulling hard enough to lightly scrape my skin, in an attempt to uproot it. (An unsuccessful attempt, I might add. That stuff is a
ah heck to get rid of!) And even then, I had only a very mild reaction that didn't last all that long, and that only after failing to do more than lightly rinse off my arm and hands. Why, you might ask, did I do something as ridiculous as all that? For the simple reason that, not being allergic to it, I'd never had to bother to learn to identify it all, so thought I was pulling on "just some random weedy vine"... It was only several hours later when I'd started itching a bit that I remembered having been told (by my horribly allergic brother) that there
was a lot of poison ivy in the area and asked my niece if that's what that "annoying weed" I'd try to pull out was, in fact...
Because even a single reaction to an allergen can lead to greater sensitivity to future exposure, I've been (a little) more careful since then, but before that, it would frequently turn out that I'd walked through big patches of it wearing shorts, without realizing it, and without even the vaguest hint of a reaction... As an aside, it's vaguely interesting (to me anyway), that my father and brother are both hideously allergic to it, while I don't remember my mother ever having that characteristic rash (though she didn't do all that much tramping through underbrush, either) so I guess that suggests the allergy is probably a recessive trait…
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