Getting Ready For Winter

We had to get hay. There was no getting around it. We could be here for a while. Our latest buyer, let’s call him Bob, got turned down for a mortgage because the bank thinks his commute to work is too long. You’ve got that right. The bank is suddenly concerned about a borrower’s quality of life and butts into decision-making like a meddling mother-in-law who gives the baby a pacifier, or takes it away—whatever she deems is right—because the mother of the baby is obviously an idiot.

I warned Bob about the trouble the banks were giving people who tried to get a mortgage to buy this place. Bob told me if he got the house he planned to transfer to one of his company’s branches closer to home after he got settled in. But in the meantime he would commute. Admittedly, it wasn’t close. Almost two hours. Just like what my girlfriend’s husband does who owns a car dealership up in New Jersey and less than what my other girlfriend’s husband does who works in Manhattan. Sometimes you have to travel for good things.

I advised him not to mention his plans to the bank. If he transferred, they’d claim he got a new job and they don’t give mortgages to people with new jobs. I said don’t give them any ammunition. Don’t even mention it. Don’t tell them that I have a really nice riding arena and you could give riding lessons if you wanted to even though you don’t plan to. Don’t even say it. (They rejected my first buyer because of that. Didn’t want her to rely on paying her mortgage by giving riding lessons even though she was a registered nurse and in fact took riding lessons on her days off.) I warned him: don’t say anything.

But who knew they’d have a problem with the commute? It didn’t even occur to me and I don’t know if it occurred to Bob because he was fine with it. Why should it bother anyone else? I have no idea how the bank found out. Are they Mapquesting the distance people go to work in addition to pulling credit reports and looking at tax returns? What’s next? Will they ask for proof that you own a riding lawnmower because push mowers require too much energy? Will they ask for references from people who will vouch that you know your way around a toolbox and can fix a broken window and repair the heater if it conks out? That actually makes sense. You would think maintaining their investment would be more of a concern to them than worrying about how far the borrower has to drive.

Bob hasn’t given up. He’s trying to get the transfer. But I don’t have a lot of confidence. Last year we thought we were closing, so we didn’t cut wood. I’m too cheap to use the electric heat continuously so I got ripped off buying a dump truck full of wood that turned out to be so green it sizzled and spit like driftwood just washed up on the beach and had to be resplit because the pieces were so big and heavy I could only carry one at a time. And you know how strong I am. I don’t want that to happen again even though getting hay is the worst job in the world. I’d rather clean sheaths. I’d rather weed-whack all the monkey weed or the pig weed, whatever that crap is that grows on the bank behind the arena like it’s on steroids. Forget manure. Even though most people would lump manure in with the sheaths and the weed-whacking, I like picking it up because that’s when I do all my thinking. That’s when my mother talks to me.

At any rate, we had to go and get the hay because I have no faith Bob is going to get the transfer and I think we’re going to be stuck here for the winter, possibly forever. Kurt was kicking and screaming. He’s sick of this farm stuff. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t ridden the horses since we moved out of Jersey eight years ago. And that was the whole point. The horses. But all he’s been doing is building barns and building fences and fixing houses and then fixing houses more so we could sell the houses. We thought we were going to kick back in the country. Have a nice, slower-paced life. Sit on the porch with a glass of iced tea and a slice of blackberry pie; maybe mosey down to the barn for a ride once in a while. But he spends more time and energy maintaining things, fixing things and trying to get rid of the things that we fixed than actually partaking in the rocking chairs on the front porch or the triple gates we installed on the riding arena so we could enter and exit on three sides or the manicured trails he keeps in tip-top condition because you never know when someone’s going to want to come and look at the house. He doesn’t even have a horse anymore since Kelly took over Bullet. So he was not happy about the hay.

The thing about hay is you have to get it while it’s available. It’s not like Jersey where you can pick up the phone once a month and say you want some and the hay guy delivers and stacks it on Thursday. Here, you’ve got to go get it yourself. And you’ve got to get it while the going’s good. Because the farmer won’t store it for you. Even if he had a place to store it, he’s not doing it. You want it, you come and get it right now before Wesley Bell comes and gets it because Wesley just picked up a couple of nice Walkers down at the sale and they need some groceries right quick. Hay, in the land of hay, is somehow a commodity that’s in short supply. At least if you want hay without mold or Johnson grass or crushed up cans and Styrofoam cups baled up with it. And it’s almost impossible to get delivered.

We got 95 bales at the crack of dawn on Sunday morning after going out for Kurt’s birthday the night before. We tried to schedule it for later so Kurt could sleep a little on his only day off. I claimed the horses were on a strict schedule regarding their meals and we would come over after they ate their breakfast but the hay lady was having none of it. She had something else to do and wasn’t waiting around for us to buy her hay. She’s one of the few around here who doesn’t go to church so I don’t know what else she had going on that was more important than getting three hundred dollars in a place where people work half a week to bring home that kind of money and where by the looks of her house—blue tarp on the roof, plywood on a window—she could use.

We’re going to need another four hundred to get through the winter. Three hundred if you go by Kurt. Five hundred if you go by me. And we’re going to have to go back before Wesley Bell gets them. I don’t even want to think about the wood.

Peeing in the Tractor Shed

Today I almost got caught peeing in the wood guy’s tractor shed. I think he thought I was casing the joint. Kelly and I were there right on time to pick up some wood but Henry was not around. I knocked on the door to the brick house up on the hill. Someone said he’d be back in a spell and slammed the door before I had a chance to ask what “a spell” actually meant. Was a spell a few minutes? Was it an hour? Was it as long as it takes to read the newspaper front to back including all the ads and in the case of the local paper, Odessa Link’s Christian column that comes out on Wednesdays and includes recipes direct from Jesus like Out of this World Meatloaf and Scripture Cake, plus her home telephone number in case you run into trouble.

This was not good. I already had to go to the bathroom. I jigged from leg to leg. I decided to start loading. This way, the minute Henry got back, I could hightail it out of there and if he wasn’t back by the time I was done, well then, I’d leave anyway and leave the check with the people up in the house or else mail it to him because they seemed kind of mean. There was no time to waste when you had irritable bladder. You know the commercial with the traffic cop?—Gotta go! Gotta go! Gotta go! That’s me.

The field was filled with mounds of wood in various stages of fading and drying. I chose a pile with pieces that looked small and easy to handle, and backed up to it as close as I could get. Kelly and I weren’t too happy about having to load the wood ourselves. We weren’t prepared. We were clean and she had on her new boots. They weren’t working boots. They weren’t cowboy boots, rubber boots or even snow boots. They were boots for good looks only, black vinyl cockroach stompers, as my father would say, with a clunky heel and a pointy toe. They did not function well but elicited oohs and aahs from the girly girls at school, which was the whole point; certainly not comfort or protection. I had on my new white sneakers. Brand spanking white. Plus, we didn’t have any work gloves. Kelly was wearing pink chenille mittens interwoven with silver threads and I had on soft leather gloves, the kind a person wears with a dress coat. I want to call them kid gloves. But I don’t really know what kid gloves are. Are they gloves small children wear? Point being, what we were wearing was not conducive to the grasping of the rugged bark of a hunk of oak or the heaving of a locust log sharp and jagged with splinters.

One of the things I like about getting wood from Henry’s is that he and his helper, Langley, a one hundred-and-thirty-seven-year-old black man who appears out of nowhere in a 1976 Ford truck, the color of grey primer because all the paint has worn off, and who I can’t understand a word of what he’s saying, do all the loading. (For those of you who haven’t had your coffee yet, I really have no idea how old Langley is—he’s old. As a matter of fact, I don’t really know the age of his truck either—it’s also old.) Anyway, you don’t even have to get out of your vehicle—just hand the check out the window when you stop hearing wood clunking in the back. That’s why we weren’t prepared with the proper foot gear or gloves. But I had to pee so there was no choice. We had to hurry.

We got out of the truck and stepped gingerly around the wet, rotted wood sticking up out of the mud. We climbed onto the wood pile, wobbled, and picked out the nice pieces. I tried to toss the logs to the truck but I was afraid I’d hit the outside of it and mess up the crappy Dodge paint job that scratches and chips if you give it a dirty look, or torpedo it through the back window, which would have been even worse. We climbed down from the wood pile cradling three or four logs in our arms, bonking our chins, scuffing our sleeves, and skirted around the wet wood to the side of the truck where we tossed the logs into the bed. They landed with a thud. It was slow going. Thud. Thud. Thud.

Finally, I couldn’t hold it anymore. There was a tractor shed right over yonder as Pearl would say and it was facing away from the house up on the hill. There was old, rusty machinery inside and a scattering of feed sacks, some overflowing with baling strings and trash. I looked around. Not a soul in sight. The only thing I could see were dozens of piles of wood, straw-colored grass sticking up out of the crusty snow in between the piles, and the woods on the edge of the field, covered with frost like rock candy on sticks at the boardwalk. I told Kelly, “Keep loading. I’m going to pee.” Before she had a chance to protest, I hurried over to the tractor shed, ducked inside and squatted lickity-split. I was standing up and zipping in under 30 seconds flat when Kelly cried, “Someone’s coming!” and bugged her eyes wide open in the direction of the old black guy’s truck which had appeared soundlessly from around the curve. I exited the shed, patting down my hair like I just came out of a public restroom and yawned like this was completely normal.

For a split second I wondered if I should admit I was in there peeing. Did he actually see me come out? What if he didn’t? Would I be embarrassing myself unnecessarily? Langley’s hearing wasn’t very good. If I turned myself in, I might have to yell a number of times, “I was in the tractor shed peeing! I have irritable bladder!” And he’d say, “What was that you say? Your bull’s fatter?!”

But even though he was a hundred-and-thirty-seven-years-old, he was still a guy and there are some things a woman and her little girl shouldn’t call attention to out in the middle of a snow-covered field with no one in sight while they are getting wood. I made small talk instead. Langley said something but I didn’t understand what it was so I took a chance it was something entertaining and laughed. I felt like telling him if you guys were here like you were supposed to be I wouldn’t have had to pee inside the tractor shed and look like I was up to no good. But I just kept nodding and smiling in case he was telling me something funny.

I could understand if they thought I was out to steal something. They know I’m a Yankee. We’ve discussed that before. It usually comes up as soon as I open my mouth. They ask right away where I am from. They say, “You’re not from around these parts, are you?” like they’re on to me. And I admit it because I sound just like the Sopranos. What am I going to do? But it’s usually not a problem because as soon as they get to know me, they see I’m okay. I’m like no Yankee they’ve ever heard about. I’m not like the ones up in the Wal-Mart in New York who trampled a guy to death because there was a big sale going on. Or like the neighbors who lived right next door to each other for twenty years and didn’t even know each other’s name. Me, I smile and talk to everyone. I’ve even made friends down at the Dumpsters. Anywhere is over the picket fence to me. Plus, I don’t like to shop, never mind trample people. No, I’m not your average Yankee.

But maybe they were wrong about me if I was sniffing around in their tractor shed while they were away. Who knows what I was doing in there? About halfway through the wood loading, Langley couldn’t stand it anymore and he walked over to the tractor shed and went inside. Either he had to pee himself or he was looking around to see what I stole. I kept loading like I didn’t notice. I decided not to say nothing. I was just so happy that I didn’t have to pee anymore I didn’t care what they thought about me.

Wood and Weeds

Two days ago we were out there doing wood. Kurt was splitting it and Kelly and I were loading it into two canvas bags we keep for wood carrying and hauling it up onto the deck near the sliding glass doors where it will be easy to get when we run out. We carried the bags to a red wheelbarrow at the top of the stairs and then rolled it the rest of the way. The hard wheel on the wheelbarrow went bum, bum, bum, bum, over the wooden 2 X 6 floor. The wheel on this wheelbarrow doesn’t have air so it never goes flat. This is the wheelbarrow that we normally use for things like mixing cement or potting soil. It’s got a shallow metal basin pitted with rust and low metal handles with rubber grips like bike handles. It’s not the most comfortable thing to push because of the hard wheel and how low it is. You wouldn’t want to be using it long term.

The one I use on a daily basis has a nice, air-filled tire and two long hardwood handles smooth and shiny from me using it so much. If I keep the tire filled, it bounces easily over all kinds of terrain. I fill this wheelbarrow with manure three times every morning. Sometimes I use it to transport weeds or bags of grain. I keep an empty supplement bucket hanging on one of the handles that I fill with junk I may find out in the gully—I was tired of sticking shards of glass and muddy plastic fragments in my pockets and then forgetting about it and washing them in the washing machine. So I thought of the bucket. It is even good for putting your hat in if you get too hot while you’re picking up manure. When I was sneaking cigarettes out behind the tobacco shed, I hid the pack in the bucket. It’s good for all kinds of things.

But my favorite wheelbarrow is the dually. I got that one for Christmas one year. It came with a big red ribbon. It is big enough to put a pony inside. It is yellow plastic and has two tires, hence the name dually, and two massive wooden handles you can barely get your hands around. It is the big mama of wheelbarrows. You don’t have to bend at all and it rolls like it’s on shocks. The only bad thing about it is it’s hard to dump because of the two wheels. You can’t just flip it over and shake it back and forth like I do with my regular manure wheelbarrow. I use the big mama for hay. Hay takes up a lot of space. Once a week I fork up all the loose hay in the shed where I break open the bales and bring it outside for the horses. If I didn’t have the dually, I’d have to make many more trips. But I can fit a lot in there. I have also used it to bring Kelly places. She hangs her legs and arms over the sides like she’s in an old fashioned bathtub and cries, “Go faster!” We tried to get the Big Stupid in it one time but he got all giddy and excited like he was caught on the couch and jumped right out and ran around the yard in circles with his tongue flapping and his tail clamped onto his butt.

I also have a miniature wheelbarrow. I bought it for Kelly back when I was trying to break her in right, when she was three and still believed me when I said picking up horse poop was a lot of fun. It is an exact replica of my red metal wheelbarrow but about the only thing you can use it for is decorative purposes. I have it half buried in the mulch in the flowerbed in front of the house and I plant petunias in it because they spread and it looks like someone was pushing it and then it tipped over and all the flowers spilled out.

Today I pushed the regular manure wheelbarrow up front and filled it with weeds. Even though we were stacking wood just two days ago and burning it like there was no tomorrow, it’s seventy degrees now and there is something crawling around the foundation that looks like chickweed but I don’t know what it is. I know it’s not lawn, that I can tell you.

You never get a break on the farm. One minute you’re doing wood and the next minute you’re pulling weeds. Sometimes it even overlaps. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get an ice storm. They’re already announcing the school closings on the TV. Eldon is out there right now pushing the spreader, weeding and feeding the lawn. I don’t know how I’m going to break the news to Kurt. I could try telling him getting wood and pulling up weeds is a lot of fun but he’s not three-years-old anymore. He won’t believe me.

We Know Stuff

Kurt is not entirely happy with what I write. At least when it concerns him. He wishes I wouldn’t let on that we don’t know what we’re doing here. I’ve offered him anonymity. I told him I’d be willing to change his name but celebrity is more important to him than his pride. I suggested the name Jerry. Jerry is my friend’s Prozac cat. Jerry is so bad he attacks dogs, sharpens his claws on steel and prefers the company of wild foxes than the other cats in the household. For their protection, he has to be tranquilized. That’s why Micaela refers to him as the Prozac cat when she’s telling me about the latest commotion he’s caused.

Jerry is also the name of a middle class guy who wears Bermuda shorts, takes Viagra and mows his lawn in socks and sandals. I thought it would be a good name for Kurt. If he wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, he can tell himself I modeled him after Jerry the Prozac cat. And if his sense of humor ever comes back, he could go into the Bermuda shorts-wearing Jerry character and give me some more writing material.

But that is neither here nor there since he thinks he has a better chance of being famous than being laughed at if I use his real name on my blog. I mean, who knows what rich and famous person might read about him and give us some money? You never know.
He said, "Just don’t make us look like dumbasses. We know shit."

Here is what we know:

We know what weed-whacker to buy. We’ve gone through a half dozen of them. I am the weed-whacking queen. I became adept at it when we moved to our last property, a farm on a mountain. I didn’t know when we bought that place that the hills would be a problem. I knew nothing about hills. I came from the Jersey shore and Oklahoma where everything was flat. All I knew is that the hills were pretty and it didn’t enter my head about how I was going to mow them. Now when I hear about that movie, "The Hills Have Eyes," I think of that place.

Turned out the hills required non-stop weed-whacking. I used three tanks of gas in that weed-whacker every single week just to keep that place tamed. The only thing that slowed me down was when the string broke and then I’d have to wait for Kurt to put it back in because I could not do it myself. Oh I tried. But refilling the string in weed-whackers requires super human dexterity and a basic knowledge of machinery. In other words, a child could do it. Not my area. So I just chose another piece of equipment and waited for him. The riding lawn mower, the push mower, the hedge trimmer—I had my pick. And then there was the weeding. The grass in Virginia grows like it’s on steroids. But if it’s a weed-whacker you want, string refilling problems aside, the blue ribbon choice goes to the orange and white Stihl.

We know how to burn wood for heat. Also the fault of that other house. The locals called it "the big ole farmhouse settin’ on the road." It was big and it was old. It had a pair of propane furnaces, one in the attic and one in the cellar, that ran non-stop in the winter time. They blew warm air out through all the cracks in the bead board walls to the yard outside. Oh, that original bead board was charming alright. And those windows! One-hundred-year old glass complete with waves and bubbles—it looked just like Country Living magazine! But when our first heating bill came and it was more than our mortgage and the truck payment put together, we decided to take advantage of the woodstove in the house and the outside wood furnace in the driveway.

Something was going to kill us. If it was not the hills or the bills, it was the wood-getting. It took two pick-up truck beds full of wood per week to heat that old farmhouse. It was not like what I had dreamed about, living in the country, chopping wood, stoking the fire, a cast iron pot of stew bubbling on the stove. No, there was nothing romantic about it at all. Since the property was so hilly, Kurt would back the pick-up truck as far as it would go up the hill until the hitch was poking into the earth. Then he’d climb to the top of it and cut a tree down. Then he would scoot back down and chop it into pieces, trying not to slide down the hill the rest of the way or slip onto his chainsaw.

Kelly and I would climb up and push the pieces down the hill and hope they rolled close to the truck. Sometimes they got hung up on stumps and we’d have to scoot down the hill, free them and push again. Then we’d throw it all into the truck. Chunks of wood are heavy. Sometimes it took two of us to haul a piece. Sometimes we dented the truck. This is why folks have farm trucks. Then we’d go home where Kurt would chop it. Then we’d stack it. Then we’d spend every waking minute keeping the fire going. And that house was still cold. Now when I hear about that movie, "The Amityville Horror," I think of that place.

We know that you can find just about anything in Wal-Mart and it’s usually junk but you buy it anyway because it’s not worth the time to go to Roanoke when you could be out riding your horses or chopping wood.

We know that you can sometimes find something good at the Dumpsters. There are Dumpsters all around here where people bring their trash instead of garbage trucks coming to your curb on Tuesdays and Fridays to get your cans like how it was done in Jersey. And sometimes someone will leave something in front of the Dumpsters instead of throwing it inside because even though she can’t use it, you might be able to. I got a nice barrel for my front porch that way. I painted it green to match the cushions on my wicker chairs, turned it upside down and wa-la, a table. I left some reindeer lawn ornaments for someone else. Brandy, who lives down by the Minute Market once got a whole set of encyclopedias and the young couple in the log cabin with the rottweiler dogs got an antique sideboard with the mirror in perfect condition.

Granted, there are signs up all over the place that you’re not supposed to take someone else’s trash or else you can be arrested and thrown in jail with the other law breakers. I don’t know why they care if people garbage-pick. I mean, there are whole books out now about Dumpster-diving and how you can furnish a whole house on it or at least a room or two. Garbage-picking has finally gotten the respect that it deserves. But the county says you’re not allowed to do it. It’s one of those dumb rules they have. They want you to recycle your glass and newspapers but they won’t let you recycle an old walnut dresser that Effie doesn’t want anymore.

So you have to be sneaky about it. Like the brothers Dewey and Fred who live down the road in the doublewide and who grow geraniums and ferns in a greenhouse they built themselves from a kit. They go at night. They take the farm truck so there’s no traceable tag and if they find something good, one looks out while the other throws it in, and then they hightail it home and examine it more carefully there. Sometimes they have to take it right back to the Dumpster because it turned out to be a piece of junk, a chair missing its rungs or a table missing a leg. But they didn’t have the time to look it over good. Sometimes they hit pay dirt and then they brag about it to the rest of us and all excited, high on a good find, they return to the scene of the crime the next night to see if there’s anything else good. This is the crime in my neighborhood.

We know about how to make money around here. Though we’ve never done it ourselves. At least never to benefit ourselves. You just have a fundraiser. Whatever is wrong, you have a fundraiser for it. Folks love to raise funds around here for good causes. They thrive on it. Spaghetti dinners, pancake suppers, antique car shows, bluegrass music festivals, donut sales on the corner of the highway, car washes in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart, seed sales, cookie sales, bulb sales and don’t let me get started on the fundraisers they come home with from school—Scholastic books, candles and candy and plastic junk you have to pressure your loved ones to buy or else your little girl will be the only one in the class who won’t win a UFO glow-in-the-dark spinning gadget that never works right. It’s all for a good cause.

I’m not against the spaghetti dinners and the bluegrass festivals because a person can walk in there of their own free will. And I’m not one to pass up either a good meal or some good music. It’s the fundraisers that require people to knock on my door and rope me into something I will never use, like the strawberry plants that are still sitting in my vegetable drawer rotting away because I don’t have the time, alright, I don’t have the no-how, to plant them. Or, even worse, the ones my daughter is forced to participate in, like the candy sales. I’m new around here. Not many people owe me favors. I don’t want my neighbors to cringe every time they see us walking up their walkway with a catalog in hand for things that cost triple what they cost in Wal-Mart. I don’t care if it’s a good cause. I’d rather just donate the money or pay for my daughter’s school trip to Monticello myself.

If someone is sick or the PTO needs something, I’d rather just give the money directly. But folks around here obviously make a ton of money for all the time and effort they put into these fundraisers because they keep doing it. And I don’t hear anyone else complaining. Maybe they just need a good excuse to get together for some pie buying and fiddle playing. Maybe I should tell them about the sad circumstances here regarding my lack of a hay shed and that ugly paneling in my living room. A nice bake sale might just do the trick.

The Do-Nothing Technique

There’s a snake in the woodpile. I think he’s there because I haven’t used the wood in a while. It got warm so I opened all the windows and stopped using the woodstove. Then it got cold again. Too stubborn to turn on the electric heat one more time when I thought we were all done, I started up the woodstove.

I had already made four or five trips to the woodpile when I stumbled upon him. I pulled my hand back and screamed. I’m not scared of snakes but it was such a surprise. I’m sure he’s poisonous. I’m sure he’s one of those copperheads. He’s a rusty color like a copper pipe. He didn’t run. Just looked at me. I threw the tarp back on top of him and went about my business. Later, when Kelly came home from school, I told her about him. She wanted to see. I warned her he’d probably be gone. It was a long time since we made eye contact. I told her to stand back and hold the dog. I got a stick and carefully lifted the tarp just in case. He was still there alright. He looked at me and his tongue darted in and out.

Kurt said we have to kill him. We can’t have a copperhead running around here. They’re bad. That makes me feel bad. He’s not bothering anybody. I’m the one who’s encroaching on the wildlife. They were here first. And he can’t help it if he’s poisonous.

Luckily, I didn’t nag Kurt to get rid of him so he didn’t go out there. That’s a new technique I learned. The do-nothing technique. How it works is this: Say he wants to go do something that I don’t want to do. Like rent a boat. In order to avoid being accused of only wanting to do the things that I want to do, like go antiquing or ride the horses, I just say okay. That makes him happy. And then I don’t get on the phone and find boat rental places and schedule dates and find coolers and Thermoses. And he never does it. Because I am the party planner. Though it’s not a formal title. Therefore, it never gets done and I don’t get blamed for it.

Or how he wants to change all the paneling in the living room because it’s not real wood. I don’t like it either but it’s not bad. It wouldn’t be my first choice of improvements to make around here. I think there’s more important things like that black stick-on floor in the kitchen that’s supposed to look like marble in some Italian’s McMansion in Staten Island.

Or the naked light bulb hanging by a cord over the stairs. So I just nod my head and say, “Yeah, we gotta get rid of that stuff.” But then I don’t look through the decorating magazines to get new ideas and I don’t shop around for new paneling and I don’t plan a weekend to do it and so he doesn’t do it. But I did pick out the new tiles for the kitchen and I have high hopes that it’ll be down soon. Nice Depression green and cream supermarket tiles, just the kind that would be in a Depression-era little farmhouse.

When I went out there today to take a picture of the snake, he was gone. I thought I saw his tail disappear under one of the bottom logs but I can’t be sure. I know Kurt sure as hell ain’t going to move all those logs to look for him. So he got away.

I feel irresponsible because I am glad. What if one of us moves the lawn cart some day and there he is and he pops out and bites us? I make myself a note to contact one of those tree-hugging people, those hippie sheep-raising, pottery-making raccoon rehabilitators who move to Floyd and who pride themselves on respecting wildlife and sharing the earth. The locals think they’re crazy. The locals would have just taken a hoe and chopped that snake in half or got one of the guns and blown it up with half the firewood and the garage behind it. The locals are probably right about what needs to be done. I can see it now biting me in the ass.