Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I ran into this guy on the road on the backside of the property. I think he's a copperhead, but he may be a corn snake. Prolly a copperhead. I rarely see non-venomous snakes here unless they have something like chicken eggs to go after. I, unfortunately, had to kill a big seven foot black snake once. She got into the chicken coop and ate all the fake plastic Easter eggs I'd put in the nesting boxes to encourage the hens to lay. I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have survived with all that plastic in her. The snakes have been on the move for the past two weeks. They cross the hill to go down the mountain to sleep for the winter in the crevasses and crannies of rotten stone.

Happy Ssssthunday.

I had to leave the house today to take the trash to the dump. I haven't been going out much lately and the beans are up and needing some staking. Actually the garden is going to be a bust this year. If you didn't get your garden planted during that early bit right after the hard freeze and the drought that started a week later...nothing is going to grow. My tomato transplants died, but I did go ahead and plant my okra thinking it an African vegetable that will probably do just fine.

The old timers are saying this is the worst drought in 50 years. It's never been this dry in recent memory. The storms arrive every afternoon to shut down the power, phone and satellite, yet no water falls from these clouds that come crashing across the mountains. Just fire. Fire rains down.

My poor little frog pond has almost completely dried up. There is just five inches of green stagnant water there. The geese used to love to go down there every morning to swim, but there is hardly enough water to get them wet.

I stopped the jeep and looked sadly down at my pond. I suppose there will be no bullfrog gigging this fall. A lone copperhead was laying there in the shallows and I thought maybe I should give Jimmy a call or go try to find him up on Naillon's where he is restoring a 19th century graveyard. My friend fussed at me when I said I might try to just put them in a big bucket if I found any. She said they can jump 10 feet. They can't, but I'd just as soon not tangle with one.