COMFORT ME WITH IVY.

I would find it "hard to live in such a house," the reporter writes. "I couldn't stand to be that crowded. There is no view from the kitchen. I need a little space between me and my next-door neighbor. I could not bear to look out my window at someone else's bare wall." She is talking about new houses huddled beside one another in a treeless, far-out community.

My own kitchen window is only a few feet from the house next door, yet I do not feel deprived by the lack of a better view. About half a century ago, a tiny Boston ivy appeared in the dusty space below the neighboring home and began to climb and proliferate. Tough and shiny wide-spreading vines now cling to that side of the house and inch their way to the roof each year, waving in the wind and winding in and out of the gutters.

The outlook from my kitchen window offers a seasonally changing view as I sit at a blue formica-topped shelf at noon, with cheddar on rye or peanut butter and marmalade, and a cup of tea at hand. Lunchtime was for many years a precious respite for me. Long ago I ate my lunch here after the big kids went back to school and while the littler ones were blessedly napping upstairs. Time out to read the morning paper, or prop a Jane Austen or a Barbara Pym or the latest Commonweal against the sugar bowl, while appreciating the quiet and looking out the window. Now I may look at the elegant book about wall vines someone gave me last year.

Fall brings loud crashing colors to the view from the kitchen window; fiery red and bright purple and old gold as the ivy blazes in the waning sunshine. Then come the winds that tear the leaves from their stems and send them wheeling out of the yard and down the alley. By late November the vine is bare, a naked network clinging to the wall, waiting to outline December's snows.

First come furry light flakes that may soon disappear, but when January is deep and serious, icicles cling to the edge of the roof and to the tracery of bare vines. In thaws that occur throughout this mean season, the wall may be temporarily wiped clean--braced for recurring onslaughts of deeper snows that will pile up at the base of the house and a week later melt onto slush in the thin sunlight that slants from the south. And accumulate again and again in the long dark winter.

Beginning in March, sustained by cups of tea and the seed catalogues that come to brighten the gloom, a vigil begins for signs that shy Persephone, with many false starts and backward glances, is slowly moving north, greening the earth, carrying the warmth of springtime to this part of the world. One searches for signs and omens: pregnant nodes on the vine slowly fattening as pale sun finds the wall once more and warms its brickwork. Tiny bronze buds burst into pale green leaves, glistening in April rains.

As summer shines on us, sturdy tripartite leaves open and grow fat, forming shallow cups for rain. Sparrows hop through the vines, looking for insects. The wall is crowded with ivy, each leaf asserting itself in the sun and rippling in the hot winds.

Several times during my own long life at this address, catastrophic intrusions have threatened the vines' existence. The house outside my window needs to be tuck-pointed. The vines are torn ruthlessly from the wall, left to perish on the ground below as the tuck-pointers' trowels of mortar outline each brick once more, repairing the damage the ivy's tentacles have done to it. Inexorably, though, the following spring will find the insistent vine rising once again, waving in spring rains, reaching for something to cling to. Once more I will see new patterns on the wall, marking the progress of another year in this old house and the one beside it.

Around the corner of the house last August, another volunteer appeared, challenging the hegemony of the ancient ivy: a morning glory vine with flowers of heavenly blue opened each morning to the sun, brightening the wall in a late-summer splurge of color.

There are other views from other windows. One of these reveals a tangle of fir trees, too tall, too dense. Someone should trim them. Another looks out on the excesses of a perennial flower bed waiting to be weeded. Late afternoon brings to a third window the view of a gridlock of homecoming traffic. This insistent stream becomes heavier and noisier each year.

The view from the kitchen window, however, happily beyond my control or intervention, needs nothing from me, never asking that I do something about it; never urging me to prune, nurture, or cultivate it according to the directive of a vine expert. Or join an organization that wants to divert it to somebody else's street.

I read in my book that in ancient Greece ivy was sacred to Dionysus, the Olympian vintner who was one of the gods. On a cold spring evening I'll look out of my kitchen window and drink to him, lifting a tiny glass of Five Star Metaxa, a good Greek brandy I picked up at the Athens airport.

Katharine Byrne writes from Chicago.