I can always tell when there's a Houston car on our road..... they drive very very slowly, ooohing and aaahing over all the cows and goats and horses in the nearby pastures. The other day, one of the city-ladies even got out of her car and walked in the tall grass to pet one of the neighbor's goats. I saw all of this from my porch, and I was tempted to warn the woman about fire-ant mounds and snakes that like to hide in the tall grass as they wait for unsuspecting mice. But I figured that before I could make my way from my porch to where she was in the grass over there, she'd be finished with her goat-petting. I watched her walking out of that un-mowed grass and she was wearing sandals with sparkling rhinestones. Definitely city shoes... I have sparkling sandals also, and they've come out of the closet only twice in the five years we've been here.
We had a fox at the end of our driveway the other night..... an adult fox, not one of the five babies that had been in our barn. The fox just walked back and forth at the end of our driveway, inspected the mailbox, looked up at both of the light fixtures, and then went on his way up the road.
Just yesterday as I walked in the courtyard behind the garage, a huge cricket jumped up from the grass and landed in my hair. I didn't even scream..... in one hand, I was holding our cat Mickey, and in the other hand I was holding his bowl of Fancy Feast. When the cricket decided to hitch a ride with me, I was on my way to the screened-in kitty-coop with Mickey. That cat has been limping lately and I'm trying to keep an eye on him and keep him as safe as possible on these 23 acres.... and sometimes that means keeping him in an enclosed area.
So in a split second, I had to decide whether to scream bloody murder because there was a cricket in my hair or keep walking with Mickey. Good cat-mama that I try to be, I kept walking. With every step, I could feel the weight of that cricket in my hair, as if it were a fancy barrette that had come loose. When I got underneath the rose arbor by the coop, the cricket jumped off and landed in the rose bushes. When we had the chickens, we didn't have crickets because the hens ate every last one of them. However, when we had those chickens, we also had more snakes because they would go after the fresh eggs. One thing eats another out here....... I just hope there's nothing out there in our woods with a taste for Italian city girls.
And speaking of snakes......... my friend V sent an eMail to tell me that all the creatures and critters out here serve a purpose, so I should more or less accept them all. (Easy for her to say.... she was a biology teacher and also worked in a nature center... her tolerance for all things crawling and creeping and slithering is much higher than mine.)
In V's eMail to me, she told me that an aunt of hers was reading in bed and just got a feeling that someone was watching her. She looked around the room and there was a huge snake on her fireplace mantel, just looking at her as she read. Not a problem for the aunt... she was a country woman. She closed her book, got her gun, and shot the snake dead.
So there I sat in front of my computer last night, wondering if the snake's blood spattered all over the fireplace, the carpeting, the bed linen, and (heaven forbid) the book. And then I went straight into our bedroom and looked at our own fireplace mantel, and then I looked under the bed, and I even picked up the afghan that's folded at the foot of the bed. Nothing there. Nothing anywhere.
I can tell you one thing, though..... I had stopped looking underneath our bed for scorpions, but I will be resuming that habit.... only now I'll be looking for snakes.
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