Hello out there – it has been awhile!
Please picture a random Tuesday evening, about 78 degrees, sunny and lovely.
City Chick is ready to ride. The work day is done, she has made the 40 minute trek from the mall to the farm, she is dressed, booted and ready to drag Sampson the super pony out and make him earn his keep for an hour or two. She walks across the grounds out to the big grass pasture and notices a really odd looking stick under the avenue of trees. This, of course, begs for further investigation because if it is a stick, it is really cool and may be worth keeping for some sort of decorative function – you never know when a cool stick will make a pretty table display turn into a really cool table display.
City Chick detours from her route to the pasture to check it out. It is really quite dark (and maybe oddly dark for a stick) and really kinky, sort of like this: \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /. What the heck – oooo, that is so not a stick. That is a snake. But City Chick is fairly confident that it is a dead snake. Live snakes usually don’t hang out in that kind of configuration, do they? Hmmm – she finds a real stick and gives it a tentative poke. And it moves.
City Chick isn’t going to lie. She screamed a little out of surprise. I mean, here was a stick that was not actually a stick, but a dead snake that turned out to be a LIVE snake. Which hadn’t moved since she poked it, which was a little odd – mostly they slither off pretty quickly to get out of the way. At this point Farm Girl comes down the driveway, riding William (a former racehorse) bareback with just a halter and leadrope. City Chick has just poked the snake again to make sure it really was alive (it is) and gave yet (another, sigh) involuntary scream when it again demonstrates that it is alive and moves.
“What are you doing?”
“I found a snake. I’m pretty sure it is a black snake, but I thought it was dead. Turns out after I poked it, it really isn’t dead. Do you want to do something with it?”
“Yes, but could you stop yelling and poking it until after I get off the horse?”
City Chick is very firm on the no screaming or yelling around horses – just ask Kuhs Kid #2 about this – so she makes a face at Farm Girl, “I didn’t know you were coming over on him!”
Farm Girl takes Will over to the pasture, swings off of him and walks back to City Chick.
“Do you want to hold it?” Farm Girl is not fond of snakes. At all. So every chance she gets, she’ll handle a snake because she not only because she is crazy but she refuses to allow herself to be afraid of them.
“No – I’ve held snakes before . . . it isn’t a big deal for me. You go ahead and catch though.”
So, Farm Girl finds an excellent snake catching stick and proceeds to get control of his head and asks City Chick to snap a picture. City Chick complies.
Farm Girl then lets said snake go. After he pooped on her arm, of course. (Really – you didn’t see that coming?)
“I wish I had held him . . . Now I want a picture holding a snake.”
“Do you want me to catch him again?”
“Ummm, yes, please?”
Farm Girl has since misplaced her excellent snake catching stick and resorts to a lead rope. She gets his head and curls his body around her arm and hands him over. City Chick takes the snake from her and then proceeds to make friends:
And so the snake is released into the lawn for the second time (and really makes an effort to get out of our sight) and City Chick climbs through the pasture fence to get Sampson. She places the halter on his head and watches his eyes get a bit googly and hears the snorting start. She fusses at him to settle down and starts leading him out towards the gate. He becomes the prancing pony, still snorting and still with the googly eyes rolling around. He’s being a gentleman about it (in horse terms) but he is NOT happy about something. She opens the gate and starts heading towards the barn when a mosquito (charming buggers) lands on her cheek and she gives it a swipe with her hands. And realizes why Sampson isn’t happy – most horses aren’t really into snakes and he is no exception, but her hands smell quite distinctly of reptile, a musty and dank sort of smell. The poor horse continues to prance next to her as she chats to him. She ties him up quickly and heads for the sink when Farm Girl attempts to get her attention for something. City Chick replies with words she’d never thought she’d say, “Hang on . . I need to wash my hands, I smell like snake!”
Ahhh, life on Farm Narnia. It is never boring.
Kuhs Farm 