Well, Maybe Not As Inept With An Ax As I Thought

Just finished reading a hub of Bayoulady/hers are always so wonderful/and I mentioned I was inept with an ax. Then I remembered a time when necessity became the mother of invention and I had to be an expert with an ax in a hurry!

My husband and I have been together for 29 years Wow! Yea! That's a big deal! Our first five or six years or so was rather eclectic as well. He and two of his friends and their wives and kids were partners in a tourist trap business/ a fur trading business/where we would sell sheepskin, steerhide, alpaca, mandalas, all kinds of stuff to tourists at major national parks all over the west. I would work in the wnter and hubby worked in the summer. The kids did fine, not even a sniffle; even when we lived in a tipi!

One September we came home to Bisbee, Arizona and David was working in the gulch as a bartender and I was cleaning the little house we rented from Mr. hargis. He built it himself in 1902 for he and his brand new wife. It was built off the ground, only had four rooms, long narrow windows, porchs on both sides, set on top of the mountain with the best spring water you ever tasted!

So, I am cleaning and opening the windows and airing it out and baby girl is playing and I pull back the rag rug in the back rooma and coiled underneath it is this HUGE red, black, yellow striped snake! I mean this thing was BIG! And thankfully sleepy! I freaked! Grabbed Katie Baby, just barely eighteen months, threw her on the bed, told her to "STAY!" and ran outside to the chopping block. My David is a big guy and he buries the ax deep, so I had to really pull on it to get it loose. Ran back inside and commenced to chop that snake into a thousand tiny pieces all the time thinking, "If I chop a hole in this floor Mr Hargis will never forgive me!"

When it was over there was snake guts all over and baby girl and I both just a bawlin!

I grabbed her up, ran down the hill, burst right into Mr Hargis' big ranch house crying and screaming "I've killed a coral snake!"

I grabbed the phone (no we didnt have one up the hill) and Mr Hargis laughed and turned around and started looking for a BOOK!

I couldn't believe it!

I was shaking so hard it took three times to get the saloons number to go through and then of course Katie's crying , I'm hysterical and David couldn't understand a word. Mr Hargis took the phone, shoved an open book in my hand and proceeded to calm David down. David came home right away of course but I was still in tears.

Tears of joy and humiliation mixed in. The open book Mr hargis gave me showed a coral snake (very tiny and skinny) on one page and a King snake (very thick and long and big) on the other page. I killed a King snake, not a coral snake.

Well, who's going to see the colour pattern when you just find one under a rug in your room I ask? I

 knew the rhyme of course, born and bred in Alabama I knew all about snakes and how to kill them but goodness that one really got me. First, because of baby girl, second cause she and I were sleeping on the floor in those days! I had been sleeping on a pallet for years before I met my David and didnt stop until both kids went to school and hubby bought us a waveless waterbed/man I miss that bed...but I digress.

So, hubby comes chugging up the mountain in the truck, pick up Katie and I at Mr Hargis, we say bye and thank you and get hugs from Mr Hargis and up we go to the house. Baby girl and I wait in the truck, I am NOT going back in ther till David takes care of that snake!! And checks out the rest of the place of course.

Out David comes, very unhappy looking, opens the truck door for me, hugs me and says "Gee Boo, you didn't even leave me enough to use for a hatband!"

MEN!