My father doesn’t remember taking part in my earliest memory, and is pretty sure I’m remembering a vivid dream. I refuse to believe that, for reasons that will become obvious, and any parlor Freudians reading this are cordially invited to shut the hell up.
When I was between the ages of one and five we lived on a ridge between two of the Finger Lakes, an old house on two acres with a couple apple trees in the back, and two ponds about which I have written before. There were a hell of a lot of snakes on our two acres. I liked snakes. I scared the bejesus out of my mother one day when she saw me running crazily toward a big old serpent, probably a milk- or gopher- or kingsnake, sunning itself on a rock near our driveway. I was shrieking in delight. “Kitty! Kitty!” Or so I have been told.
After a bout of herpetophobic nagging my father decided to do something, and went out into the yard with a lidded picnic basket and a long-handled shovel. I tagged along. He’d find a snake, pick it up on the blade of the shovel, then drop it into the basket and shut the lid. “We” (I was “helping”) gathered a basket full of snakes, then walked up to a spot between our apple trees at the back of the property and my father beheaded each snake with the shovel blade. I retain part of this memory with a peculiar vividness: An attractive yellow and black snake attempted to escape the basket. My father brushed him back in with the back of the shovel blade, saying “where do you think you’re going, buddy?”
And then he walked a little ways toward the apple trees with the basket and the shovel, and then came back after the job was done.
My father says he doesn’t remember this ever happening. He’s a particularly soft-hearted man as regards animals, and has no doubt blocked this story from his memory.
That must be it. It couldn’t have been a dream.
So in this “memory” does your mother say “I want these m*th*rf*ck*ng snakes off my m*th*rf*ck*ng lawn”? And does she look like a tall good looking black man?
dammit. I wanted to be the first to make the Snakes on a Plane reference!!!
now I’m just thinking about how cool it would be to have a yard full of pretty snakes.
Dad had a nice red and black stripey guy living under his back garage door step, used to sun himself on it… I vaguely remember Dad saying something about not bothering him, etc. So I think dad appreciates snakes in general.
Craig, did you mean to say your Dad used to sun himself on a red and black snake? Because that’s how I read that sentence.
I grew up in Houston, Texas, and my mother was terrified by every conceivable scenario by which I and my two brothers might get killed.
To give you a hint of how freaky the situation was, there were times when we didn’t have enough to eat ... but we all had burial insurance from early childhood.
Somewhere near the top of the list of dangers were snakes.
Years after leaving home, I saw a map of the home range of the four types of poisonous snakes in the U.S., and they all four overlapped in one small area of the country—which included Houston. I chuckled about it when I realized that at various times during childhood, I’d seen, IN MY OWN YARD, rattlesnakes, copperheads, coral snakes and water moccasins.
... Funnier still, the decorative hedge my mom tended so lovingly was the deadly poisonous oleander.
Finger Lakes? Finger Lakes? Someone else besides me knows the beauty of the region? I’m going to faint.
As for parents not remembering what you do, oh tell me about it. My mother does not remember things that I think are incredibly important and the same goes for my sisters. She doesn’t remember the things that shaped them.
I thought my mother was just, well, mom. Then my friend brought up the same phenom—with her daughters remembering things that she did that she doesn’t remember.
I’ll tell my dad stories about things he did and he responds similarly sometimes: ‘huh?’
Now, my son is doing the same to me. It’s pretty interesting what actually sticks with your children. The things you think might be the most important things aren’t necessarily the memories that stick with them.
Bitch |, at one point there were like four people who read CRN who lived in Penn Yan, not counting my relatives.
Are university-trained neo-Freudians allowed to speak up? I thought not.
I’ll just walk away from the comment box now… smiling.
Bitch said “Finger Lakes? Finger Lakes? Someone else besides me knows the beauty of the region? I’m going to faint. “
Chris said “Bitch, at one point there were like four people who read CRN who lived in Penn Yan, not counting my relatives.”
Hey, don’t forget your fans in Rochester, who read CRN religiously and think the Finger Lakes are amazing! We are leejun.
Vicki:
Rochester! I’m getting homesick—not that I’m from Rochester—though I did live there. Worked at the Genessee Bakery for awhile—don’t even know if it’s still around.
Oh. I’m homesick. Oh! I can smell Concorde grapes right now.
I doubt it was a dream. My mother did much the same thing when i was nine (1956). We had moved from the beach to the top of the (then still open and natural) Santa Monica Mountains. In the first few months we had experienced a plethora of native and indigenous flora and fauna including a few rattlers. One day, my brother and i were moving some rocks, trying to replant some aloe, and heard that distinctive rattle quite close. My mom comes over, looks around a bit with a shovel; then goes inside and comes out with the shotgun. She asks my brother and i to lever up a rock with a long handled shovel and 2 X 4. As we do that she blasts three rounds under it. We lift it up, and she has splatter five baby rattlesnakes to bloody pulp; a very intense upclose species murder.
Years later i asked her about her aggressiveness towards snakes. At first denying it, with more prodding she told me her story. Her older brother had found a copperhead, and killed it by drowning. He then had run a wire through it and arranged it in a striking coil pose. This was in rural Kansas in the early 1920’s and electricity was only just beginning to replace gas as an energy source. When my mom had come home from a high school date, she had to reach up to turn on the gas and light the lamp in her room. Her brother had coiled the copperhead on her dresser just below the lamp. When my mom looked down from lighting the gas lamp, she was staring at this snake. She retained her terrorized fear of all poisonous snakes until her death in the 1990’s. She did let us have a pet king snake for a while, since they warded off rattlers.
aieeeee…
My mother encouraged me to collect snakes, and often helped. We did it in the graveyard behind the church; I’d bring home big mason jars full of them. The very thought makes me shiver today, but my mother still handles snakes without any fear at all. None of us would have considered harming them. My difficulty with them began right around puberty, when a snake I was tryng to “catch” went down a hole—and broke in half. I was left holding the tail, in absolute horror. I swear this memory is true as well.
Beth, if you were left holding the back half of the snake, it probably was a glass snake, which is actually a kind of legless lizard which will easily shed its tail to make an escape.
One of my earliest memories is of my uncle taking me into our back yard in West Point, MS and showing me how to turn over rocks and concrete blocks to find creepy crawlies, including little grey worm snakes. I was both terrified and fascinated and have yet to stop turning things over to find the critters living underneath.
This is one of many memories which I recall with absolute clarity which the adult involved has no recollection of. The details at least seem plausible. My parents were pretty tolerant of snakes (my mother is instead scared of birds after a childhood run in with a cornered rooster), but the favored method of dispatching the occasional copperhead that took up residence in our yard was beheading by shovel.
Thanks, deadantstomp, I agree that that would be the most logical explanation - but I know my snakes, and this was an ordinary garter snake, by far the most common variety in central New York. I still don’t understand what happened, but it freaked me out.
Story of my Uncle Bill:
Aunt Blanche & Uncle Bill were living on their claim, out in the hills of Nevada. Uncle Bill was mostly done with his cowboy days, settled down to gold mining—the gun was still at hand, in case some varmint showed up.
When the rattlesnakes got too annoying, Bill would carry them off away from the trailer a half-mile or so and tell them that if they came back, he was going to have to kill them. And if they did, he did.
Don’t know how he told one from another, but I believe he did.
You want Freudian, consider the fact that Joe’s mother, after a similar childhood run-in with an aggressive hen, was for the rest of her life phobic about birds of all kinds.
I swear this sounds like a movie scene, or book scene. Sybil?
Not that it couldn’t have happened for real, of course, but it sounded familiar when I read it.