Twisted Country Fun - Big Spiders & Little Snakes

I mentioned we've been seeing turtles. Charley even stops the car to rescue them when we see them on the road. We've been seeing snakes, too, but the snakes are always smooshed flat and mangled if they are on the road. I've seen him handle his favorite snake, a harmless hognose gone limp, one we found out around the nose cone buildings last fall. Recently, I was talking on the phone and pacing around outside. I was hoping it would fill in for my usual tour of the grounds, but I found myself walking up and down the lane. On my second lap, I walked up farther, closer to the main road than the last. There, on the ground in the middle of one of the tire tracks on our lane, lay a broken and jointed looking snake. Snakes are usually smooth, with lots of curves. But this one lay with its tounge lolling out of its mouth, in angles. It had been run over to be looking like that. Except! It could be one of the tricks the hognose snake plays - opossum, being one of them. The others include hissing and flattening its head like a viper, and even sometimes shaking its tail and hissing to masquerade as a rattler. I watched it for a while, still absorbed in my conversation. It didn't look like the hognose I've seen, and besides, I've seen them go limp, but I've never seen one portray brokeness, for goodness sake. Only the roll of a big tire could have done that to the poor little thing. I was still having this conversation, but now I was really distracted. I wanted to get the dead snake and save it for my husband! He would like that. (weirdo) He could tell me what it is, and we might even skin it. That would be cool. But ew! I don't actually really want to touch it. I've seen a recently extinguished snake before - they still move in reaction to heat and touch stimuli, even without a head and skin on the meat. Ew. I didn't want to touch it because it might move, and then I would have an involuntary freakout and feel stupid. So I picked a stick. Well, I was looking for a stick, but the light was fading and I had to hurry, so I just broke off a dry weed, about 8 inches of dry weed to poke it with. Poke it? Well yes. I was pretty sure it was dead, but just in case, I was going to poke it. I'm faking attention to my conversation now. Remember? I'm still on the phone. And I'm moving in on the snake, reaching my - oh really probably too short, I realize, to keep me safe from anything, but I keep poking that stiff weed out towards it. .. poke. POKE! Scream! Kara jumps. Snake jumps. Hissssss! Slither! Scream! Pant. "Sorry for screaming in your year, Mom. " And I might have explained, but I remember at least thinking " yeah, I poked a dead snake. It wasn't dead. I guess that was a hognose. " It was kind of a weird situation to explain all the sudden. It was outta there, never to be seen again. I was left tasting the metallic tang of adrenaline that I hate to love so much. Yesterday, I spotted a Banana Spider hanging out on its web, attached to the roof and wall at the back of the house, by the laundry line and the rock pile. Banana Spiders are HUGE spiders, and weave a gossamer web with a thick, cottony zig-zag up the center, where they usually rest. I admired its race-car coloring, jags of hornet yellow and pure ebony all over the shiny carapace and smooth, jointed legs. Tonight, I spied a wild-eyed, stripey-legged large and juicy hopper - one of the damned grasshoppers that has been denuding the fig tree, and felling the mandevilla flowers within moments of bloom. I wondered aloud to Charley what would happen if we grabbed it, and tossed it into the Banana Spider web. He thought it would hop a lot, and ruin the web. We decided it was worth some action, and spiders repair webs all the time... that's the point. Just to be kind, Charley yanked the legs off the poor prickley hopper, and tossed 'er in. MAN. It wasn't 5 seconds and the big lady had her wrapped in one translucent layer of silk. Wide sheets appeared, and the spider rolled her bundle. The next pass made the packet opaque, and the spider crunched down to deliver some uh... anesthetic. We both stood there with our mouths open, and then our conversation was something like "that was fast did you see that?" "Yeah, oh my god that was fast holy cow!" That spider made quick, tidy work of that poor handicapped grasshopper. I felt a little guilty, almost, for greedily handing out an advantage. The spider didn't even have to fix her web, and she left her little package to liquify, and resumed her place on the soft pad of cottony zig zag, the throne in the middle of her impenetrable fortress.

I left work earlier than usual today. A few cavers, fresh from the Guatemala Expedition, are returning and our house is a convenient stop over on their way further west and north. I wanted to be home to greet them. They'll be here any minute.

Leaving early grants me the pleasure of a few hours of workweek evening daylight hours. I am sure that this delight will increase with the growing summer, but right now these hours are at a premium, I haven't experienced them much all winter long. I often take this extra grant of time at home to walk our land. I still haven't been everywhere on it! Frequently, and especially when I'm not wearing long pants in which to brave the wild bramble on most of the land, my path follows our lane, at the front of the property. There are lots of flowers blooming along it right now. And the butterflies were out tonight! There must have been a hatch, there were several with ruffle-y wings not yet quite expanded to fullness for flight. There were bees, which I note especially right now amid so much news of the rapidly failing populations of honey bees. There were remarkably many black flies, as well. And of course mosquitoes. I actually screeched in fright at the big black bug that landed on my arm at one point - a large attack mosquito. I know better than to wander with bare legs, but my linen skirt rustling in the breeze felt so liberating that I didn't pause to change before heading out, so now I am itching and suffering the welts of mosquito nibbles. I absolutely marvel at how big they get, and at how weirdly shaped the sharply defined welts are on my wrists and behind my knees.

I visited our compost heap, and it seems it has been made into a fire ant apartment complex. I couldn't resist poking it with our compost stick, and watching them roil forth. As I sit here and type, I still have the 'creepy-crawlies' - the feeling that there are little teeny insects crawling on you, whether or not they actually are there. There are, in fact, a few small critters wandering lost up my shins, but I have crushed them to dust with my ninja-like reflexes heightened by fire ant paranoia.

The flowers that are blooming are called Firewheel, or Indian Blanket Flowers. They were being visited by Red Admiral Butterflies, in abundance. Also I spotted two American Buckeyes, a black swallowtail of some sort, and a large hairstreak. They were sunning in the fading light, and I was entranced. I think I saw about 20 individuals flittering about and pumping their wings. The winecups and the Texas Paintbrush are still blooming, and the field off of the short leg of Hwy 21 that I travel was still boiling over with bluebonnets. I lingered in the flower patch in the ditch, outside our gate at the very front of the land. Several folks drove by in big rumbling and whistling trucks, and waved at the girl standing by the side of the road, staring at the weeds.