Tag: snakes

It’s in the Kitchen

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

Him: I emailed you a picture.

Me: Of what?

Him: Look at the picture.

Me: Okay. But what is it?

Him: It’s in the kitchen. Just look at the picture.

Me: [Looking at picture] THAT’S IN THE KITCHEN?

Him: Uh-huh. I put a bowl over it.

Me: WHAT KIND IS IT?

Him: I don’t know.

Me: [Seeing no rattles and defaulting to lowercase] It’s probably a good, helpful snake. But it’s still a snake.

Him: I’m surprised it stayed still long enough for me to put the bowl over it. I don’t know what to do. I could call maintenance. Or try to rehome it myself.

Me: CALL MAINTENANCE.

Him: [Hanging up phone] They say it’s not an emergency.

Me: If I’d reported it, it would be an emergency. I’d have talked in capital letters.

Him: I guess I’ll go to Walmart.

Me: Will they send somebody?

Him: Yeah. In a couple of hours.

Exit Him.

Me: I guess I’ll memorialize the event in a blog post.

Snake: Two hours? These idiots are going to keep me stuck in this dinkey little kitchen for two hours? I’ve got to get back down to the creek. The family will start to worry. Austin: people crowding in, buildings shooting up, concrete and asphalt creeping across the natural landscape, exhaust fumes fouling the air.  Progress. This town sure ain’t what it used to be.

Later.

Him: I sent you another picture. For size comparison.

Me: [Looking at picture] Maybe capital letters weren’t warranted after all.

 

***

Him did not really hang up the phone. Him pressed a button. But old language dies hard, and in my posts, phones are still hung up.

Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

 

A dove strolled across our patio last week. Soft brown, a graceful, gentle visitor.

Squirrels appear occasionally but finding no acorns, swish their tails and move on.

Last week, two chameleons crawled up the screen, prompting Ernest to move.

Ours is a quiet life.

Then one afternoon David said, “There’s a snake on the patio.”

He said it in the voice he uses to announce the arrival of the Amazon truck. Nothing to get excited about.

I went berserk. Grabbed the camera, ran to the window. But before memorializing the event, I checked the tail and the complexion. The tail was small and pointy, and the spots were spots, not diamonds. I relaxed.

But it was a snake nonetheless.

Please spare me the explanation that snakes are God’s creatures, that they eat rats and other things that aren’t good for us, that they merit respect and benevolence.

I know they’re God’s creatures, but so are sharks, and I don’t care to cozy up to them either.

I once held the rear end of a boa constrictor and know snakes are soft and silky and sweet when they’re not swallowing goats.

But I take the Biblical view—a snake is a serpent. If it stays in its tree where I can’t see it and doesn’t try to strike up a conversation or ooze down and bruise my heel or the heels of my pets or my livestock, then I won’t try to bruise its head.

But if it has rattles on its tail or venom in its fangs, or if it surprises me by its presence, then I’ll grab the nearest shotgun and try to blow it to kingdom come, although I know practically nothing about shotguns because the only time I got to shoot one my daddy made me aim it into the river.

I don’t want serpents on my patio, and I don’t want to wake up and find one in my bedroom, which is where this one was headed. It slithered up to the glass, looked in, then settled into the sliding door track and headed out looking for means of ingress.

David had already taken preventive measures against marauding humans. Not trusting the sliding door’s lock, he’d braced one of my never-used canes in the track inside. When the snake’s intent became obvious, David quickly stuffed a wad of paper towels in whatever space might have remained and replaced the cane.

Unable to enter, snake went along and went along. David got the big square meter stick, compliments of the Lockhart State Bank back in the ’60s, went outside, reached over the grille work, and flicked the snake off the patio. It took several flicks, but David was gentle. The snake looked surprised and a little disgusted at being launched into flight and landing on the rocks outside. But he showed no sign of pain.

I have admit to feeling a little sorry for the visitor. Temperatures are dropping, and if I lived outside, I’d seek warmer accommodations, too.

In fact, after spending six days without heat during the February Freeze of 2021, I’m tempted to go out and gather every mammal, every bird, every chameleon, and march them, two by two, inside for the winter.

But not snakes. Both the biting kind and the tempting kind belong as far away from me as I can keep them.

I gave away my dad’s shotgun, which is fortunate, because if I woke up and saw a snake, I’d probably blow myself up trying to shoot it.

But I’m going to put that Lockhart State Bank meter stick beside my bed. Just in case.

What I Learned from Ernest Hemingway, Plus a Photo of Gregory Peck, Plus Snakes

Posted on by Kathy Waller in Uncategorized

What if soy milk is just milk introducing itself in Spanish?*

***

To Write, etc., has been dormant for a while because I’ve been (a) playing spider solitaire, and (b) working on two pieces of literature:

(1) a story entitled “When Cheese Is Love,” which needs to be 5,000 words but is currently 6,200 words, necessitating radical surgery and the murders of a few darlings; and,

(2) a post for the Austin Mystery Writers blog that would have been online last Monday had I not suffered at tiny fall (and, no, I’m not going to tell how it happened), which rendered me indisposed for just long enough to figure out the post wasn’t coming together as I wanted because I was trying to write about two different topics at once.

I can’t complain about an indisposition that allows me time to realize the first half of a post I’ve drafted says one thing and the second half contradicts it.

My next project will appear right here on To Write, etc. It is tentatively entitled “Snakes I Have Known.”

I spent this evening telling snake stories on Facebook and suddenly realized–it’s like that chapter in For Whom the Bell Tolls—no, it’s in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” actually–where Hemingway wastes a lot of material writing about what his character would never write:

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. . .

***

He remembered the good times with them all, and the quarrels. They always picked the finest places to have the quarrels. And why had they always quarrelled when he was feeling best? He had never written any of that . . .

***

No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about. But what about the rest that he had never written?

What about the ranch and the silvered gray of the sage brush, the quick, clear water in the irrigation ditches, and the heavy green of the alfalfa. The trail went up into the hills and the cattle in the summer were shy as deer. . . 

About the half-wit chore boy who was left at the ranch that time and told not to let any one get any hay, and that old bastard from the Forks who had beaten the boy when he had worked for him stopping to get some feed. The boy refusing and the old man saying he would beat him again. The boy got the rifle from the kitchen and shot him when he tried to come into the barn . . . 

So there it is. Hemingway threw away all those stories by putting them inside of a dying character thinking about the stories he will never write.

And Hemingway never wrote them either. He wrote about them. What a waste.**

Heaven forfend that I should meet a similar fate. I’m not going to write about those snake stories. I’m going to write them.

So watch this space.

In case you don’t care for snakes, don’t worry–I won’t include pictures of them. And no one will be bitten. All my snake stories are true, but I kept my distance while they were happening.

***

*The question is rhetorical and appears only because I’m feeling whimsical. And because this is  my blog and nobody’s grading it and I can do whatever I please. So there.

**For most of this post, my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek, but this paragraph comes from the heart. It’s sad that Hemingway left stories untold. It’s sad that any writer does that. And I guess they all do.