Always Use a Bag - Repost

I'm fascinated by the beauty of many natural things -- old bones, shells, rocks -- and shed snakeskins. It's amazing to me how a six foot plus blacksnake can slip out of his old skin so neatly, leaving behind a perfect ghostly image of himself down to the lenses that covered his eyes.

There's been ample opportunity to study these shed skins -- we have one blacksnake who leaves a skin in our greenhouse several times a year while others twine their discarded finery into the crevices of our rock walls.

Blacksnakes are mostly welcome around our place -- they eat rats and mice and are said to deter copperheads. Unfortunately, they also eat baby birds and on occasion, one has taken up residence in our chicken house, swallowing the eggs one after another. When this happens, I try to catch the snake, put him in a bag, and take him for a ride around the mountain to release him in a wooded area.

I didn't always use a bag. It just didn't occur to me. But came the fateful day when I had hold of a great large snake lumpy with just-swallowed eggs. I handed him to my 15 year old son to hold while I drove the truck to the accustomed snake release area a few miles away.

We hadn't even gotten down to our mailbox before the snake began to poop. (Somehow, I'd never considered this possibility.) It was pasty and yellow and smelled (no surprise here) like rotten eggs. Appalled, my son let go of the snake's body but managed to hang on to his neck. "Arrrgh!" my son shouted. "Mum! Look what your snake is doing!"

And now the snake was regurgitating the last egg he'd eaten. I stopped the truck. "Just put him out here," I said, trying to sound really calm.

Easier said than done. My son had control of half of the snake -- the head end. But the tail end had slithered under the truck seat and was firmly wrapped around the jack.

By the time I'd gotten the indignant snake loose, the completely indignant son mollified, and the interior of the truck cleaned out, I'd learned a lesson.

Always use a bag.

 

This is a snake, lumpy with something he's just eaten -- probably mice. and this is a re-post -- there were no comments on its first outing three years ago -- maybe everyone was just grossed out.

Silver Threads

This seemed an appropriate re-post from two years ago.
 

One of my favorite emails about my books was from a woman who said, "Elizabeth makes me want to quit dyeing my hair and be who I am."

Back in high school I had dyed hair-- my mother's attempt to make me more glamorous -- just to 'brighten up' my rather ordinary dark brown hair. Then I got into it -- in college I was various shades of strawberry blonde; when I got married, I could be fairly, if somewhat romantically, described as 'raven-tressed.' 

Then I got over it. What had been fun became tedious. Keeping up with roots showing was a real drag. So I got back in touch with my inner brown-haired girl just in time to watch her begin to go gray. (We gray earlier in my family -- except for my mother who became ash blonde.)

The encroaching white hairs never bothered me -- and for quite a while they were limited to a streak or two at my temples. By the time I first heard someone describe my hair as salt-and-pepper, I was thirty years old, the mother of a toddler, and teaching full time with not a spare minute to be looking in mirrors. 

And then I was moving to a farm and milking a cow twice a day and having another baby and raising a garden and still not looking in mirrors. 

Somehow, by the time I'd taught both sons to drive on our narrow, winding, guardrailless mountain roads, my hair'd become mostly white. Imagine that!

Years ago a visiting friend told me that she'd like to quit dyeing her hair but in her job, she needed to look young. This puzzled me -- but I'd been out of the work force so long that I didn't argue. 

Then I saw this article in the NYT about a best-seller How Not to Look Old -- aimed at women over 40 worried about "professional obsolescence and economic vulnerability."

Oy! Why should looking young matter to a professional (unless you're in show biz or a hooker, maybe). Shouldn't it be about how well you do the job; not whether you still look like you're capable of bearing children? And why is it more acceptable for men to age? And no one expects them to wear lipstick.

There's nothing wrong with dyeing your hair and wearing makeup if you enjoy it -- but there shouldn't be anything wrong with not doing so ....

Here's the link to the NYT article -- and the comments are worth reading too, especially number ten, from the man at Attica State Correctional Facility.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/fashion/24skin.html?em&ex=1201410000&en=06b6899885b3f203&ei=5087%0A

Moonshine Revisited

A re-post from '08. It may be the continuing snow that has me thinking of strong drink...

I wouldn't know, myself, where to find moonshine for sale but thanks to the proverbial 'friend of a friend,' we were given a jar a few months ago. It came from Tennessee and, who knows, maybe even from Pop Corn (see Thursday's post) himself. Those are sliced peaches in the jar and I'm told this is a fairly common practice -- using fresh fruit of various kinds to flavor and color the white liquor.

We've been given jars of 'white' before this -- always from friends who swear they know the origin of the stuff and can vouch for its safety. We keep it around to offer a 'sup' to visiting flatlanders who are curious about this infamous local product. (It tastes a lot like tequila to me -- not bad but not something I'm crazy about.)

In the old days, the local folks didn't go to making whiskey out of a desire to break the law or to get drunk. It was a simple matter of economics. If you live in a remote mountain cove and your main crop is field corn, how will you make more money -- hauling bushel after bushel of dried corn down the mountain and to market to sell for animal feed or cornmeal -- or do you turn that same corn into distilled whiskey, using the knowledge and skills your ancestors brought over from Scotland and Ireland?

Whiskey was easier to haul, more valuable, and it kept well. One of the earliest 'value added' products.

Of course, with taxation, Prohibition, and dry counties, things changed and moonshining turned dangerous. And then, as the bootleggers used fast cars to transport their illegal cargo over twisting mountain roads (see Thunder Road with Robert Mitchum), it all led to NASCAR.

Aye, law.

I have no idea what folks pay for white lightning but I suspect it's not cheap. I've heard tell of the tour buses of country music stars lined up at one particular bootlegger's home and and the quart jars being loaded on by the case.

It's a nostalgia thing, I suspect.

A Wilkes County copper moonshine still
Courtesy of Applachian Cultural Museum
Applachian State University
Boone, North Carolina

For more information on moonshine, go here

Elizabeth's View

"The three big windows framed what could have been a delicate Japanese ink drawing -- all muted colors and simple lines, with hazy mountaintops poking through the low-lying fog like islands in a pale gray sea of mist." (from Art's Blood, p.411)

Our eastern view -- always changing, always gorgeous. In the morning the mist rises up from the river to produce lovely ephemeral scenes.

Being fortunate enough to live where I do, how could I not write about it? Elizabeth's house and farm are based on our house and farm -- 'write what you know,' they often say. And I have enough to remember already, with all these characters and pasts I've created; it's comforting to have to remember only (so far) that Elizabeth's house differs from ours in just two particulars. For one thing, Elizabeth has a mirror by her kitchen door (Signs in the Blood, p. 11).

Hey, it was my first book and I hadn't known that it's considered cliched and amateurish to describe a character by having him or her look in a mirror. Sorry. The other difference is that Elizabeth's sofas are still denim-covered whereas our denim-covered sofas were trashed by the dogs and have been replaced by leather. But then we have six dogs while Elizabeth, a saner woman than I, has only three.

This is a re-post from January 7, 2008.  Alas, I have only three dogs now.