Ethyl Recounts: Yikes!! Snakes

One thing Tishomingo County seems to have plenty of is snakes.  At least that was the case when I was growing up.  From the time we were old enough to walk we were always admonished, 'watch out for snakes'.  Snakes were just part of growing up in the rural south.  We were taught to hate all snakes on sight, and that included both the harmless and the harmful.  In retrospect that was probably so we wouldn't take a chance and get too close to a venomous one, but looking back, it does seem a bit unfair to the members of that family who did no harm to us. In fact, they probably provided a useful service.  But no matter.  If it crawled and slithered, it was doomed on sight.
I remember once when I was young my brother who was four years older than me came up to the house all excited because he had caught a pet snake.  He picked it up on a sixteen penny nail and put it in a quart fruit jar.  In the majority of instances it would have been a harmless grass or chicken snake, maybe a black racer.  When he presented it to Mama, she turned white.  It was indeed a small little snake, maybe four or five inches long, but it just so happened that this particular snake was a pygmy rattlesnake.  One little nip could have done a great deal of damage.   And to just think he had actually picked it up on a long nail a few inches in length!!  When it was suggested to him that he would actually have to dispose of it, he loudly protested.  A neighbor happened to be at the house that day and he told my brother the snake needed some rocks to lay on to be happy.  My brother agreed to placing some small rocks in the jar.  "Now he will need some water to drink", he said.  So the jar lid was removed and the jar filled with water.  Within a very short time the snake had drowned.  Thus ended that terrifying saga.
When we were young every snake we encountered was a rattlesnake.  Of course, most of them were just black snakes or racers, but to us they were Rattlesnakes!   So Mama paid very little attention to us when we reported to her we had seen a snake.  "What kind was it", she always asked?  "It was a rattlesnake", was almost always our reply.  We had neighbors who lived a few hundred yards down the road from us, an old couple we referred to as Uncle Lee and Miss Addie.  They were not, in fact, kin to us, but we were constantly running back and forth to their house.   This particular day my little brother and I started off down the road for our daily visit when we encountered a snake lying in the middle of the gravel road.  We ran back to the house and told Mama there was a snake in the road.   "What kind is it"? came the standard question, to which we gave the standard reply, "It's a rattlesnake".  She left her kitchen chores and walked down the road with us to see what she thought would be an ordinary black snake, and a look of total shock came over her face.  Lying in the middle of the road where we had first encounter it was a three foot long diamondback rattlesnake.  Needless to say, she made the trip back to the house to get a hoe much faster than she had made the trip from the kitchen to the road.
My next major encounter with snake-dom came when I was a teenager.  We had little bantam chickens at the barn, and they made a habit of nesting in the loose hay in the barn loft.  On this particular day I was baking cupcakes and realized we were out of eggs.  A trip to the hen house produced naught, so in desperation I decided I would try the barn loft.  Bantam eggs were small, but if you had enough of them they would work just fine.  We had a ladder in the middle of the barn hallway that lead up to the open loft, and for a spry young girl of fifteen it presented no problem to ascend.  So basket in hand, I climbed up in the loft and begin my hunt for eggs.  Eureka!   I found a nest that had fourteen.  I gathered them all and started down the ladder backwards, carefully holding my basket so as not to spill its precious contents.  I happened to look straight down the ladder and at the very bottom of it, curled in a nice lump, was a humongous snake.  As it happened it was a chicken snake, on it's way up into the barn loft to look for eggs or baby chickens. But at that particular moment it mattered not the least what kind it was.  It was a SNAKE.  Paralyzed with fright, I hung onto the ladder for what seemed an eternity, although in reality it was probably not more that a minute or two.  How could I get down the ladder and past that snake at the bottom of it?  He wasn't moving, that much was for sure.  After considering my options, I decided to jump, hoping with everything in me I could totally clear the snake and not splash my eggs all over the barn hallway.  One, two, three.  Here goes. 

Well, the story did have a happy ending.  I cleared the snake, kept my eggs in tact, baked my cupcakes and the rest is history.  But I do have to say, it took the rest of the day for my poor shattered nerves to return to normal.