June 25, 2017 – Day Two – Broken Toe and Mr. Snake

        It is just a little broken toe.  Who would have thought it can disrupt your life so much.  Pussy footing around – walking on mostly my left heel to avoid pain I notice I don’t have very good balance.

        You walk or stand for just about everything.  You are standing for 90% of all housekeeping – making a bed, folding and putting away laundry, cooking, feeding the cat and dog, and taking the dog out for a walk.

        I haven’t put on shoes yet and I was out on the front steps barefoot with Jack dog on a leash.  Not much balance, I had to hold on dearly to the railing.  I hobbled through the wet dew grass while he was doing his duty. I snapped off four blooming gladiolas that last night’s fierce rains knocked to the ground.  I am just as unbalanced coming up the stairs to get back inside.  I will need to re-think everything I am doing for the next few days.

        I didn’t sleep well, the covers rubbed on my toe and woke me up.   

        But, I have to keep moving.  The garden produce is coming in and you just can’t let it wait or it will be ruined.  Barefoot, I hobbled down to the vegetable garden with my plastic produce basket to pick beans. 

The two short five foot rows of bush beans, yellow and green were fully loaded for a second picking.  I bent at the waist for picking at the waist and worked one side with my 2 ½ foot reach, then hobbled to the back side for the rest of the 2 ½ foot reach.  I must say I did pretty well with balance until I had to stand up – then I got a little wobbly. I netted about 3 quarts of beautiful fresh beans.  On the way back to the house I hobbled to the patio vegetable garden to check on the status of the Bok Choy and the white Tokyo turnips. 

What has dug up several turnips?  They were tipped over and lying on their sides, the center root still in the ground, but the soil completely swept away around the white roots so that they looked like motionless spinning tops.  I leaned in closer to inspect. Who would have done that?

Then suddenly I noticed the unmistakable black scaly skin of the tail end of a snake only inches away.  Barefoot, and unable to move quickly I yelped a startled cry.   I backed away carefully, as I’d just about touched the tail end of a black snake.

I could see it clearly now, unusual, looped back and forth and intertwined at the base of the flowering sweet pea vines.  Unusual the way it’s head was tipped back so that the whitish underneath chin was exposed.  At once I realized it was hung up or caught in the plastic netting that I had used for the sweet pea vines to climb on.  It had its full length swelled with lizards or lizard eggs [skinks] and it couldn’t get out of the unintended trap.  It had entangled itself and its wreathing tail has swept back and forth in the soil and swept my turnips mostly out of the soil, now only clinging with their deep center roots.

This was the first year I’d ever used the plastic 1 inch square netting.   Was the snake dead? It was more than five feet as it was looped the full width of my 5 foot wide garden.  It was not moving.

I backed away further and told my husband who came to investigate while I safely hobbled into the house.

“She’s exhausted, but still alive.”  He reported when he came into the house.

“Why a SHE?  HE was after lizards and did you see how he swept my turnips out of the ground?” I replied.

I didn’t want to even think about it. I’d have to get rid of a dead snake in a day or so which made me involuntarily shudder.

Later in the afternoon my husband, the ‘Good Samaritan’, had cut away the majority of the netting so that the snake could get loose and get away.

“I cut away the netting, she’s gone off now. She didn’t bother me, she just looked at me, didn’t want to bite me as I got her free.”  He told me.

Me, I wasn’t thrilled that the snake was alive to scare the daylights out of me in the future, that it had swept my turnips out of the ground, that it had hunted and probably exterminated all my lovely lizards [skinks].  But, when I glanced at the area where the snake had been entangled, I noticed that my husband had ruined my stand of flowering Sweet peas.  Half the flowering row was torn out and laid limp on the ground.

I was thankful I didn’t have to deal with it, but I bet that snake is a HE and his name is ARNOLD and he is chanting as he is resting up before his next foray back to my patio garden.

“I’ll be back.

I’ll be back.

I’ll be back.”