Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Rattlesnake, Beware

My grandma is seriously the coolest and toughest person I know. She is my hero [C - you are my water polo hero, but grandma takes the boat in the rattlesnake category]. I love my grandma!

She ends up in the craziest predicaments. She has quite a few rattlesnake stories, which she has shared with us as they come. Living in a more woodsy/hilly area, I guess you encounter them more often. And boy, she sure gets them.

Today, I got the best email from her telling of her most recent rattlesnake conquest. [I asked her if I could post this.]

"I have a new rattlesnake story for you. Monday afternoon I was going out to work in the yard. When I opened the kitchen door, there was a very large rattlesnake! Maybe he had heard me because he was already coiled up. I hurried to close the door, but about a foot of him got into the house. I was holding the door as tight as I could against him (I couldn't get it closed all the way). He had his mouth open, his tongue wiggling and he was hissing. (He certainly was a good picture of that other serpent, the devil.) I couldn't let go of the door to get anything to kill him with, and I certainly didn't want him to get all the way into the house. I leaned my hands against the door and kept my feet back far enough out of his reach. Uncle Sean couldn't hear me calling him. Fortunately the phone is right there. So I held the door really tight with one hand and called him on the phone. He came running down in his stocking feet and was looking in the shed for a shovel. Then he comes running by the back door and around to the front door into the house because there isn't a shovel in that shed. He gets the key, runs out to the other shed and comes back with a shovel and the loppers. By this time he is out of breath and I was hoping he wasn't going to have a heart attack. He used the shovel on the snake. I told him not to worry about the kitchen floor, just keep chopping him with the shovel until we knew he was dead. So the snake was finally mostly severed. I opened the door. Sean picked him up with the loppers and then finished severing his head out on the porch. We got his head buried because of the venom. The rest of him was in a bucket. (His body was still moving a half hour later.) Once again the fearsome duo triumphed! After cleaning up the kitchen floor and hosing down the porch (blood and guts, you know), we settled back down into our mild-mannered selves once again."

I seriously think my grandma deserves a Guinness World Record for number of rattlesnake encounters and successful defensive kills in two years. Maybe I'll submit that.

She also said they come out in the summer. Oh great. It's just beginning.

Thanks for sharing your adventures with me, Grandma. I'm sure glad you've got so many angels protecting you!

2 comments:

  1. New name for Grandma: Carol the Courageous! I feel faint just reading about this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unbelievable, she must have a reputation within the snake world, now the young bucks try to force their way into her house thinking "Carol can't kill me". Remind me not to move there

    ReplyDelete