You've Come a Long Way, Baby

Two items in the category "You come a long way city girl".

  Snake season is back. I spared you the photo. They all look about the same. Long, black, sometimes black and white, four foot to six foot coiled nuisances. I know they have their positives. I am willing to sacrifice a couple of eggs if he's keeping the venomous snakes at bay. I just don't need him hanging out in the chicken coop all day eating all of my eggs. So we have an agreement; he gets an egg or two and, when I catch him, he goes out. (I realize I've gendered an animal that I don't really know the gender of. Moving along.) I have a stick I keep in the chicken coop just for snakes. It's been in the same place since last summer. It's always frustrating. I try to snag the snake with the stick in just the right spot to pick him up and toss him out, while he wiggles around trying to get away. Finally, in frustration, this time I reached out and grabbed his tail hoping to sling him out of the coop. Yes folks, I grabbed a snake. I did make note first that he was fully stretched out so his head was 4 feet away from the end I was grabbing. But still . . . .
  I once jumped, screamed and ran in the house when I found a tiny 6 inch baby snake while clearing an area to plant flowers. I made Joan go out and make sure it was gone and there was no mama or siblings before I would go back outside. I once considered moving out of our East Point house because I found a snake skin by an outside wall. I once had to be led through the snake exhibit at the Tennessee Aquarium with my eyes closed because there was no other way to get to the next exhibit. But this week I grabbed a snake by the tail. Alas, I wasn't able to hold on long enough to sling it, but it did leave the nest box I'd found him in and slithered out of the chicken coop, belly full.

Part two: I have neighbors who like to shoot guns. One is usually sighting in his rifle or shooting at a target to prepare for hunting season. One is a Union City police officer (A Union City police car is frequently parked in the driveway) whom I assume is getting ready for his or her annual qualifying shoot. Based on the direction I hear it from, I assume this is the one who has at least three different calibers of weapon. I can hear the difference. One sounds like a damn cannon. This is the shooter I heard this week, the one I've heard so many times that I don't even stop what I'm doing any more. This time, my neighbor across the street, one who doesn't hunt, called to ask me if I'd heard that gunfire. His daughter wanted to go outside to play; but the gunfire made her nervous, and he suggested she stay inside. I reassured him that I knew who all gun toting neighbors are and most of them are nothing to worry about. I explained about the Union City officer that lives behind me and that I assumed this was him (or her) and that his daughter should be safe to go outside.
  I didn't tell him that the only neighbor that makes me nervous with a gun anymore is the one who lives directly behind him (In hindsight, maybe I should have). He is the only one I've known to be drunk, firing off an antique black powder gun just for fun. He's also the only one who has actually required police presence when, in our first or second year here, he threatened suicide and threatened to shoot his wife if she called the police. Our first awareness of the situation was a late night helicopter and two Fulton County police cars with blue lights flashing, sitting on the road below the hill the goats live on. I saw the blue lights as I was finishing up milking. We were planning to walk the dogs and take some eggs to a neighbor, so I walked up the road toward the police cars with my arms in the air (with a carton of eggs in one hand that looked like who knows what in the dark) to see what was going on. Both officers had their backs to me, and I think I startled them a little when I said "hello" from a distance to make myself known. One suggested that maybe we shouldn't be out walking the dogs. She would only say that a neighbor of ours was having a rough time. We found out the rest from an online news source the next day. The police had surrounded his house but he'd managed to slip away into the trees for a while before they found him. He still lives there, but I don't think his wife does. I've never really tried to get to know him.
  I will admit that New Years Eve and July 4th are kinda scary here. I usually try to stay indoors myself and worry about bullets coming back down through a roof of an animal shelter. But the rest of the year I don't worry much anymore unless a shot sounds closer than usual and comes from a different direction than I'm used to. That happened recently, and I started texting neighbors I knew had guns, hoping it was one of them, and I would get reassurance. It was none of the neighbors whose phone numbers I have, and the strongest possibility was he of the drunken firing off of a black powder gun. But it was only the one shot and nothing more. So what are you gonna do?
  I surprised myself by being the one to reassure my neighbor that this controlled gunfire was probably safe, even though some of those shots sounded like something really big. The first time I heard gunfire here, there were a lot of shots fired; some in quick succession, some more slowly. This was on a Sunday afternoon before we'd actually moved into the house, and as far as I knew at the time, there was only one other occupied house on the street. The gunfire was coming from the direction of what used to be a commercial nursery where there are some open growing areas on the back side of the property and other areas of trees convenient for hiding in, and my brain went haywire imagining things like drug deals gone bad. I called the police. When the officer showed up (quickly) she drove down the street and back (it's only about a quarter of a mile long) and reassured me that she didn't see anything. By that time the gunfire had stopped. The next time we heard lots of gunfire coming from the same direction, we were both there and agreed that it didn't sound normal (What did we know of normal out here? The only gunfire we heard in East Point usually came from Cleveland Ave and our police office neighbor and good friend would explain later what the crime in progress had been.) and called the police again. This time a different officer explained that there was a kind of unofficial shooting range in that direction and we shouldn't be concerned. They knew the folks and knew it was a safely run range. So that was the first of several directions that I learned that gunfire from there is probably okay. Now I'm kinda getting used to my neighbors' shooting habits, and I don't usually go running inside or call the police anymore. Heck I've even done some target practice here myself in the driveway, shooting at a box with a hill behind it, shortly after the second time we saw a coyote in the field next to the chicken coop.