“Then of course there’s my boyhood friend and idol, Weyman C. Wannamaker, Jr., a great American in the truest sense of the phrase. There was almost no end to Weyman’s talents and his heroism. His most heroic act, however, was single-handedly removing the snake from Kathy Sue Loudermilk’s dress. Of course, it was Weyman who put it there in the first place. A man has to do what a man has to do. It was just a little garden snake, but after Kathy Sue flailed around for a while, screaming and shrieking, Weyman began to feel guilty. So he pushed everyone aside and took it upon himself to remove the snake. As the serpent worked its way south toward Kathy Sue’s lovely hiney, Weyman shouted, “Don’t worry, Kathy Sue. I’ll stop it before it tries to make a U-turn!” Weyman grabbed for the squirming snake, but all he came up with was a handful of Kathy Sue’s shapely buttocks. The terrified snake crawled past her step-ins and headed for the apparent security of her ample bosom. Weyman, ever vigilant in his attempt to save the lovely Kathy Sue, he reached down the front of her dress in search of the snake. Five minutes later, he snatched the devil from a pit the likes of which it he would never find again.
“Are you OK?” Weyman asked Kathy Sue.
“Fine,” she answered, smiling at Weyman.
“Are you gonna tell your father what I did?”
“I sure am,” said Kathy Sue. “I’m going to tell him you dropped a snake down my dress twice. You do have the time, don’t you?” - Lewis Grizzard
I haven’t run up on a decent snake lately. Maybe it’s the fact that I didn’t do as much turkey hunting this year as I should have, or could have. That’s normally where the serpents and I usually intersect this time of year.
Maybe it’s the lack of shooting carp and gar with the bow, like I should have or could have. That’s another normal close encounter situation that didn’t materialize like it normally does this time of year.
Picking bush beans, squash and cucumbers haven’t turned up any adders of late. I know they’re there. Sometimes when the wind is right, you think you can smell them lurking in the beans, or the garlic, as it slowly fades from brilliant green to yellow. It just seems like this year the snakes are just a bit more hospitable than in years past. Could it possibly be from a serious lack of water?
I don’t recollect a May, or a stretch of June, that has been this intolerably dry. I look for the fat bodied water snakes in what’s left of the minnow pond and the crawdad hole, but I think the Blue Herron has scarred the thick brown snakes on down the creek. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a Herron eat a surly water snake. Who knows what these long legged fowl will eat when they’re out of minnows and local crawfish?
I have been babying the garden through this intolerable dry spell because I simply don’t want to see the groceries wither from thirst. My Grandmother used to say, with a hiss that seemed to carry some semi-negative connotation, that my Grandfather was out “Piddling” in his garden.” “Piddling” doesn’t quite describe what’s been going on here to keep the groceries alive during this most recent lengthy stretch lacking rain.
Okra seems to be lagging also. After three plantings, I’ve decided that I get just in too big of a hurry and plant these seeds when the ground is still too cool. I smell the fired okra and just get in too big a rush. The third planting is struggling but it’s hanging in there just he same. A little water never hurt.
I wanted to yell at my Grandmother when she hissed the word “Piddling.” I yearned to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that my Grandfather was not “Piddling”. I wanted her to understand that he was preventing her from blowing their Social Security check on produce at the Piggly Wiggly, which was probably trucked in from South Florida, or some other foreign country, after being picked by Haitians, some four to six weeks earlier.
It took just about four weeks to get anything non-local deep into the mountains of West Virginia’s Mingo County’s coal fields. But, I never could yell at my Grandmother. I just “Piddled” in the garden with the old man and listened to him ramble philosophically about how incredibly difficult it was to grow decent vegetables in the depths of Chatteroy Hollow.
Maybe it’s been too dry for snakes to crawl about the beans. Maybe they’ve all gone to the lake for drought relief. Hope springs eternal, as they say.
The weed eater and the hoe aren’t exactly idle, even in a drought such as this. Most weeds in the squash appear to be a bit more hardy than seeds sprouted in a green house. There’s no “maybe” to it. “Piddle On!” There’s really not much else to do at this point but to pray for rain.
There is some small upside to this lack of water as it relates to pasture maintenance. There’s still ample time to sharpen the blades on the old bush hog. This is chore planning that repeats itself every year for five or so years now. Sharpening the blades is more of a concept of planning than it is a thing of actually doing. I’ve stoically managed to put this sharpening of the blades in abeyance for at least four or five years now. The pasture is currently in a dry-grass condition like the horses have never experienced in June. There’s still time to attend to the blades on the rusting bush hog.
There was the morning I drove to Tellico Plains, Tn., and walked into a beer joint. I asked the barmaid where I could get breakfast. She said for two dollars she would go to the grocery store and buy the fixings and cook me up something in the back. It would have been a bargain at any price. Fried eggs. Bacon. Potatoes. I paid her the two dollars and handed her a two dollar tip.
She smiled a toothless smile and said, “God bless you, youngn’. I been savin’ six months and I was just two dollars short.”
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of enough to buy some store-bought teeth,” she said. “I ain’t chewed nothin’ in fifteen years.” - Lewis Grizzard
p.s. Did you hear the recent one about Bob the trans-trapper who went deep into the Canadian wilderness to trap fur? Two years later he re-emerged from the wilds of the great white north wearing a deer skin skirt, lipstick, a ring in his nose, a bee hive hairdo, completing his ensemble with a blonde mink bolo, where he immediately announced himself as “Ronda the Fur Queen.” Bob, or Rhonda’s story, may be based on actual events. Who really knows these days?
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