MindSpinner

Catapult Kid passes his GED practice test with 700 points to spare (top score in his platoon).  Now that’s relief, people.

And joy.  I get to brag on him.

Last night was made all of rain, thunder, and lightning that spidered white across half the sky. The homecoming game ended abruptly in the first half, when a sudden, long-fingered fist of light opened and ripped from east to west, then closed back into the dark with a ponderous roll of thunder. A night of a thousand daybreaks ensued. At 2:30 in the morning I pulled a pillow over my eyes.

Outside this morning, when the rain abated for an hour, the water garden, the dog bowls, and a garden bucket all brimmed with water. I headed out with a blue wire basket to pick yellow beans.

If yellow beans have a name other than yellow beans, I do not know what it is. If they are traditionally grown outside of the confines of a single Georgia mountain valley, I do not know where that is. The seed has been passed down for generations in my family, and now that my mother, at 77, can no longer raise a garden, and my aunt and uncle are likewise past the task, I don’t know whether anyone else besides me is growing them at all, though I hope so. The mountain valley, like the area where I live now, lies in Zone 6, so I have long had hopes of growing yellow beans. Until this year, I had not had much success. The summers here are hotter, and the soil is different. Last year’s spindly vines produced only a handful of beans. I left them where they grew. Over winter, they dried and fell into the soil, and early last summer, the strongest of them grew into three volunteer bean plants. I worked organic matter into the soil around them, hoping to make them happier with their new home.

For months I succeeded only in growing only lush green vines (the soil now being too rich) that wended their way over an arbor and into the blackberries, the grapes, and a nearby rose. Finally, in early fall, the vines began to bloom, and shortly thereafter, about three weekends ago, I began to pick yellow beans.

Yellow beans do not taste like green beans or any other sort of bean I’ve ever eaten. They are not a wax bean. I want to say they have a nutty flavor, but that’s not accurate enough to be helpful. (You won’t know whether you like them until you’ve eaten them - I like them better than any sort of green bean.) The beans themselves are a dusky purple gray, and the hulls, when mature, change from a soft green to yellow and offer a hint of texture on the tongue. The hulls are flatter than a green bean hull, which is round like a pencil, and the shape of the oval bean within is more visibly pronounced. The vines like to grow tall and then stretch out horizontally for light. Where they find their light, they make their beans. Next year I will build them an arbor. At home, my mother trained them up stalks of field corn, as her grandmother and great grandmother did, in the Cherokee way, but I’m not planning on field corn since I can’t use it for animal feed.

I would not have these beans lost to the world or to my garden or to my table. I would no more give up the growing of them than I would dash my great great grandmother’s blue milk pitcher to pieces on the floor. They are heritage. They link my fingers that plant and break and prepare them to the fingers of my foremothers, breaking the same beans with the same quick, practiced motion. I can see in my hands the hands of stern-faced women I’ve known only from faded photographs, seated in hand-caned chairs in front of an open cabin door.

I’m going downstairs to have some of them for lunch.

We teachers, we go with the flow. We are ready for anything, almost, because we’ve very nearly seen it all. So when we open our classroom door come Monday morning only to note that the ceiling, if not the sky, has fallen, what do we do but collect a few materials, park our first period students in a room with a teacher on her planning period, go in search of available classroom space for the rest of the day, notify maintenance, and convince the superintendent, who probably needs no convincing, that we need to check the rest of the ceilings over fall break.

Amazingly, maintenance, not to be outdown by the whims of gravity, installs a new ceiling by the end of the day, properly anchored to studs above.

Fortunately, though Monday was Monday only moreso, tomorrow is Friday come what may.

Eastern Hognose snakes turn out to be, in fact, an endangered species. I’m still letting that sink in.

I’m not keen on slaying a member of an endangered species with my hoe or my machete when I find him lolling about in a bed of pepperment and thyme, even if he lacks fur and legs to which I am irrationally partial. (I’m not being sexist about the gender of my snake, by the way, only hopeful, since male snakes don’t lay eggs.)

Maybe I’ll get more used to Hognose if I give him a name. If I call him Mr. Horatio Hognose, for instance, would that help me keep his person in perspective when next we meet? On the other hand, I like the simple name “Wrinkle.” I’ll decide his name when or if I come to have a better look at him. Likely after I scream.

Crocodile Dundee assured me that I’d run less risk of attracting snakes if I removed the “cover” in my yard. The cover of which he speaks is, of course, my garden, and I am not removing it in order to discourage an unwelcome guest. Habitat I have created; inhabitants I will have. Only one option remains. I’m going to have to make my peace with Mr. Horatio Hognose and with the idea of him and his ilk being about. I already knew we had snakes back in the woods; the difference is that now I know this one traversed my garden in order to slip under the deck and into the dogs’ pen. So I have to be prepared to meet him when I’m digging up the carrots or pulling up the grass that’s working its way into the lavender border.

I’m just not sure that looking at six pages of Googled images of Eastern Hognose snakes is sufficient conditioning ;->.

Sundays are the perfect day for leisurely pastoral posts, written after an hour in the garden.

Not this Sunday. I had just finished mowing the grass and putting up the mower when I heard the dogs making a terrible fuss, growling and barking in alarm. I walked to look under the deck, where they were holding forth in the corner. They had something cornered, and that something did not have fur.

I couldn’t see so clearly through lattice and wire, but it looked very like a snake, and there were the dogs not two feet from its nose. I ran up the steps into the kitchen and through the garage to get to their pen. They have access beneath the deck for shade and shelter there, and I could just see them getting bitten by this snake. From the other side of the deck I could see more clearly the reared head, black and gray, spread like a cobra. I argued with myself that I couldn’t be seeing a head spread like a cobra because there aren’t any cobras around here. And the markings were wrong.

I called frantically to the dogs, but they were intent on the snake. Finally, the one that hears broke away to come toward me, but he was torn and didn’t want to leave the action. It took me a minute or so to get him to come, to scoop him up and carry him into the house. The deaf dog was more difficult. I could yell all I liked, but that would make no difference. I grabbed the yellow plastic bag that held our new yellow pages phone book, ran back out and waved it frantically, still shouting despite that fact that shouting could make no difference. Finally, the deaf crusader saw me and came away from the reared snake.

With both dogs safely inside and the snake still under the deck, it was one of those moments one rues being single. I have no gun with which to kill a snake, and the only way to get at this one would be to crawl under the deck, which is less than 2 feet off the ground in the back corner where the snake was.

Because I didn’t know what else to do, I called 911.

The 911 operator took my information, did a quick consultation, and returned to the phone to say that the police wouldn’t come to my house to take care of the snake unless it was in my house. I didn’t see inviting it in as an option. “What would you do if there was a snake underneath your deck,” I asked. “Whom can I call?

I was given two numbers for Fish and Wildlife. The second number raised an answer. Fish and Wildlife had someone in my county on call. His name was Benny B.

Benny B’s wife answered the phone and said that Benny B. took care of nuisance animals, but he didn’t do snakes. If I were Mrs. Benny B, I might have said the same thing.

“I don’t do snakes, either,” I said. Just that very minute I was wishing for Crocodile Dundee. Or maybe Harrison Ford in Six Days, Seven Nights.

I called Fish and Wildlife back to tell them that Billy was a dud, and they gave me two numbers for Crocodile Dundees in neighboring counties. The first was a hit. Here was a guy who likes snakes. Here was a guy who would come out to get this snake in the dark, even if he had to crawl under the deck. $75 for the trip. $125 for a nonpoisonous snake. $175 for a poisonous snake. Did I still want him to come?

“There is a snake under my deck,” I reiterated. What sort of silly question was “Do you still want me to come?”

Forty-five minutes later Crocodile Dundee and his wife showed up. Croc donned his snakeproof leggings, looked all around with a flashlight in every corner of the garden. He crawled under the deck with bare, tattoed arms exposed, and prowled about in the yard, all the way back to the back of the lot, which is virtually snake paradise. He lifted the doghouse and looked underneath.

He did not find the snake. I hope I don’t find it either, but I suspect I may one day, while out pulling weeds. I looked up native snakes on the Web and found my snake, an Eastern Hognose - not poisonous to any significant degree, not aggressive, and not unlikely to roll over and play dead, but capable of spreading its neck cobra-style and thus managing to terrify me.

As he turned to go to his car, Crocodile told me the good news about having a snake, and he meant it, “You won’t have any rats or mice,” he grinned.

Callooh. Callay.

So which would you opt for?