It's been alternately blistering hot and rainy for the past couple of weeks, and although I've kept up with the picking in the vegetable garden, I haven't done any weeding. The grass is about to get out of control. Yesterday morning, though, was lovely, and I decided to crank up the tiller and plow up some grass before the weekend festivities started.
While I was in Pop-Pop's shed gassing up the tiller, I heard a commotion - banging noises, and Nanny's high-pitched voice - on the back porch. I stepped out to have a look. Both Nanny and Pop-Pop were on the porch. She was holding a butcher knife in one hand, and wiping her brow with a paper towel with the other. Pop-Pop was staring at something on the floor. I called to them, "Is everything OK up there?"
Nanny hollered back, "SNAKE!"
"Do you want me to bring a hoe?"
"No, I've done killed it three times," Nanny said, wiping her brow again.
I went up to have a look.
Snake, indeed. It was hard to tell what kind it was, or how long it was, as Nanny had chopped it into so many pieces that it looked like Benjamin Franklin's "JOIN OR DIE" cartoon, but its individual pieces had impressive girth. By this time, Nanny had raked all the pieces onto some newspaper. She was insisting that it was a copperhead or a water moccasin; Pop-Pop said it was probably a chicken snake. As I stood there listening to Nanny tell the sequence of events, I couldn't help but be amazed at her plucky courage. Having seen the snake lying along the floor near the back wall, she'd grabbed a hoe that she'd left propped against the porch rail. Her first blow had shortened the snake's back-end by about 1/3. The remainder of the snake had crawled into a crack between a support post and the wall. She'd grabbed its oozing stub and had tried to pull it out of the crack ("You did what?!"). She'd managed to drag it out a little - enough to cut another few inches off its tail - but it had somehow expanded the remaining section of its body so that she could not pull it free. She'd run in the house to get a butcher knife, and had jabbed behind the support post until the snake surrendered, at which point she'd finished it off. The banging I'd heard was the combat finale, as Nanny sectioned it a few more times for good measure.
As she and Pop-Pop stood there, fussing about who was going to dispose of the snake pieces, and where, I quietly sneaked back to the shed. I do not do snakes, live or dead. Some time later, The Husband came riding up on the lawnmower, and they made him do the dirty work.
The little black tiller was especially contrary about cranking, and so I was already tired and the day was growing hot by the time I got to the garden. I'd purposefully not worked around the tomato plants very much, thinking that the less I disturbed the soil, the less blight fungus I'd stir up. Thus, the grass was fairly tall, and firmly rooted, and it took a lot of digging to uproot it. Three hours later, I gave out and headed for the shade of the back porch and a tall glass of water, without having even finished the tomato rows. The grass I'd intended to rake up and dispose of (so that it wouldn't take hold again) still lay in the dirt, and the rest of the garden was still un-touched. But the last of the purple-hull peas needed to be picked, the okra and eggplants needed to be cut, and I had a ton of other things to do besides gardening. After cooling off a bit, I went back to the garden with a sack and a knife to get the okra and eggplants. The Husband came out to pick the peas. The rest of the tilling and raking would have to wait. I put the tiller back in the shed, came home for a shower and a change of clothes, and climbed into my Jeep to drive into town.
Nanny had given me a short list of things she needed from the grocery store. I shopped for her and for myself and started home. The Jeep's top was down, and the wind felt wonderful after the heat of the garden, but about 2 miles from the house, a few big drops of rain plopped onto my windshield. I kept driving, thinking I'd make it home before the downpour started. Wrong. By the time I reached my driveway, I was drenched. The Husband came out to help with the groceries and the Jeep top, then we went to deliver Nanny's things.
She and Mama Jewell were sitting on the back porch, shelling peas. "Good heavens, you're sopping wet!" Nanny exclaimed. I took the groceries in, then came back out to sit with them.
"This rain came out of nowhere!" I said, explaining that I'd been caught in the rain with the top down.
"A piece of that snake must have landed belly-up,"* Nanny surmised.
* * * * * *
* There's an old wive's tale that, to bring rain, one should lay a snake belly-up on a fence.
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