The Snake I Didn’t See

August 12, 2015.Reading time 7 minutes.

Did you know that a snake can lunge and envenom a person for up to an hour after it has been killed? Seriously! What power of darkness is this?

I learned that fact when my children were very young. We live in the woods and have taught them the rules about snakes: see snake, run screaming from snake. One day they were bounding down the steps to their cousin’s swing set when my eldest saw one on the path. She stopped the merry procession and called for me.

It was a bad one. A fat copperhead stubbornly coiled on a short retaining wall at a child’s eye level. In fact, one of them had passed within a foot of its mouth before they spotted it. There was no angle to use a shovel, so I had to resort to my brother-in-law’s rifle. I am an excellent shot, but don’t own a weapon (Unless you are a criminal or young man with bad intent interested in one of my daughters, then I have an arsenal). Read More

The Empty Chair

August 5, 2015.Reading time 8 minutes.

We spent last week at the beach – a familiar condo we’ve visited several times. When the summer schedule was being formed, there was no question whether we would go. At issue was how hard it would be without Kylie. She is an ever-present mist coating our lives, so almost everything is hard. But not everything holds an opportunity of mingling the hard with fun. This place offers that.

In fact, I’m sitting here now typing this in a room of bright yellow. I never noticed the vibrant color of the common room before. Yellow has a new meaning for me these days. It is early morning and any previous summer she would soon walk out of her room rubbing her eyes and push my laptop aside to sit with me. She would ask me what I was writing and I would usually tell her a Virgil Creech story while she mooched my coffee. Sometimes, if she was still tired she would ditch me to go snuggle her sleeping mommy. But most of the time, I got some precious alone time with her. I had no way of knowing just how precious it was. Read More