Snakes and Democrats
A great rambling by
Mostly Cajun on snakes, childhood and Democrats:
bq.
Snake stories
Over at The Boiling Point (he’s on the blogroll over on the sidebar)
there’s a story about the horrors precipitated from the incursion of a serpent into a scene of domestic bliss. Swallow your drink, set down the cup, and read. You’ve been warned. Blowing coffee out one’s nostrils is not conducive to decorum…
bq. Down here in southwest Louisiana, we are in close proximity to the habitats of a wide variety of reptilian life. I’ve previously posted
a story about how a small snake can perform miracles, like making my Uncle Pete walk on water…
bq. Dad used to always keep a few chickens. He liked the fresh eggs, and occasional yard-raided chicken was a big flavor difference in Mom’s gumbo. In the country, though, keeping chickens meant the occasional run-in with chicken snakes. In reality, they hung around chicken houses for the rodents attracted to the spilled chicken feed, but on the odd occasion, they’d eat eggs, too. I do believe that Dad reaching into a nest in a dark hen-house expecting to find an egg and instead encountering a scaly moving reptilian form resulted in the fastest movement and most colorful language I remember from him.
bq. Chicken snakes were a common enough problem to where remedies were available to stop them from eating eggs. Actually, the most common remedy cured two ills: first, the egg-stealing snake, and second, the fact that some hens won’t lay in an empty nest.
bq. We’d put in a “nest egg", usually a porcelain or glass replica of a real egg. Chickens not being the brightest things in the world (they generally voted a straight Democratic ticket) , they’d just assume that they’d laid the egg the previous day and lay another beside it. the fact was, chickens could be fooled by a porcelain doorknob. Like Democrats, chickens would be happy if we fed them regularly, provided free housing, faked them into believing they were having a meaningful existence (that “nest egg") and were generally happy despite the fact that occasionally Dad would show up and haul one off to slaughter.
Read the rest -- it's a great story.
Posted by DaveH at February 12, 2005 2:58 PM