June 28                                                  Lesson 4.1 Fluency Blog- Day 4

I HATE SNAKES

I believe that God has a purpose for everyone and everything, but one of the things that is a continuous mystery to me is why God created snakes. 

Here I am, what I consider myself to be a fairly “macho” kind of guy…crap, I’ve been through hell in my short lived life and I’ve made it back to where I am now. I’m not afraid of much, but there is something about those things…those creatures  that slide around on their bellies, hiding in the most inconspicuous places waiting for me to reach down or step on them, that reminds me of the Devil himself lurking in the darkness waiting to drag me to hell. I just flat can’t deal with ‘em…I don’t care what kind they are, and I’m not going to hang around long enough to find out either.What was God thinking?

I remember on the farm, kicking over a long piece of lumber which had fallen off the stack that my dad had to redo the floor of his trailer. There he was…I swear he was ten foot long, (even though I’m sure he was only about three) the biggest, fattest, ugliest copperhead all coiled up under it. I knew he was just waiting for ME…couldn’t have been anyone else; not mom, dad, or my sisters, he had to be waiting for ME. It wasn’t because I wasn’t smart enough to just stand real still or to back off really slowly, but my heart was in my throat and my feet and legs were frozen where I stood.  I could see him glaring me straight in the eye with this tantalizing look of contempt…..then he slowly slithered off.  My legs were shaking and I was weak in the knees, but I ran like hell back to the shop where dad was working to tell him. Of course the snake was already gone and not much he could do about it then but tell me to keep my eyes open. Damn right I’d keep my eyes open. Not only that , I would dream about that monster at night with my eyes open!!!

We used to go down to the creek down in front of the house and behind the shop to catch crawdads. They were plentiful down in our creek. We’d done it from the time I was really little…mind you I was only five or six when my folks split up and we moved from that place…so when I talk about this I wasn’t but just a toe head little kid anyway…but that summer the crawdads had seemed to disappear. There had been a lot of rain kind of like it has been this year and we figured that was why. NOT…guess what…we had a momma cottonmouth down there with a whole nest of babies…and those crawdads sure made good eating for them or be scared off.Did you know that a cottonmouth will flat chase you? Oh YEAH!

There were several other occasions, like when I was helping my sister get hay out of the back of the shop to feed the horses. She reached up to grab a bale of hay and there, with its ugly, nasty head sticking out of the bale, dared us to grab it. I could go on.

Then there was the summer we’d gone to Linden on the 4^th to swim, fish and do fireworks. My mom’s cousin and his kids were with us and he had brought a net so we could catch some minnows for bait. When he pulled it in there was a baby snake..about the size of a big night crawler. OK..disposed of…no biggy. Yeah sure!

 But the next day mom was off  work and didn’t have school that day, so we went back to swim. He were are, my sister and I swimming in our favorite spot, mom sitting in her lawn chair sunning, reading a book and listening to music. No one around because it was a work day…We had the place all to ourselves. We notice all this stuff floating in the river…looks like little cotton balls that have fallen off the trees bobbing up and down as we splash and carry on…no biggy...NOT!!!!!!…it was hundreds…and I do not exaggerate…hundreds of just hatched baby cotton mouths. Mom told us to quietly and quickly get out of the water…we packed up and we haven’t been swimming down there again. Again, nightmares for a week!

I’m reminded of this, and bring this all out, because the 4^th is coming up this weekend.  My fiance and my daughter are going to be here, we are making it a family affair with my mom, my sister and her husband, and even my dad is gonna tag along. I want her to know some of the same joys I had as a kid, going to the creek, shooting off fireworks…and I’ve been thinking where we could go to do it. I thought of Linden. We swam down there for years, my mom swam down there when she was a kid…people have swam down there for several years now after the “bobbing babies” as they came to be called, and I’m sure they will swim down there for many years to come. So, I guess I’ll just buck it up and try to man this one out, take my kid and the family and head to the creek in hopes we don’t meet up with one of those “devils waiting to drag me to hell.”

Did I mention I HATE SNAKES!!!!