The song says it all
by Rebecca Lindquist
The frequent rain showers have me thinking of the farmers. It has to be challenging, not to mention frustrating, trying to harvest a hay crop in between random cloudbursts. When I was little, we lived on a farm and I recall one summer, when all it did was rain. We spent the duration turning hay bales.
Nowadays, it’s common to see huge round bales of hay. When we farmed, back in the day, it was rare, and the bales were small and square, and bound with baling wire. Those bales seemed to weigh a ton and it was difficult to pick them up, because the wire was extremely tight.
Or at least it seemed that way to me, but I was only about five years old at the time. Baling twine was much lighter and easier to grasp, but prone to breaking.
Turning hay bales was one of our chores. My brother, Tim, sister, Bethie, and I, would follow Mom out to the hay fields each time after it rained. It was necessary to do this to help dry the hay. If the moisture content is too high when bales are unloaded into the haymow, it can cause the hay to fire or combust.
I owned a little pair of red rubber boots that came up to my shins. I would wear those when we went out to turn bales. Mom, Tim, Bethie and I would each take a row. The worst part of that task, as far as I was concerned, was the snakes that chose to reside under the bales.
When we turned over a bale and there was a reptile that needed disposing of, we would stand on it until Mom came, with a small army shovel, to dispatch it before continuing on. I don’t recall the acreage of the fields, I just remember we found a staggering 118 various snakes in the large field and the small one contained 87.
Though several strays made a speedy getaway before they could be pounced on, that’s still way too much slithering for my comfort level. The positive aspect is, we didn’t come across any venomous snakes, though they were prevalent in the area. There were multi-hued garter, rat and worm snakes.
To this day, I am still not fond of snakes. Maybe it’s because of the childhood trauma of having to step on them? They just seem creepy when they come at you with their rapidly undulating body and their mouth open, with tongue aggressively flicking in and out.
In reality, I know that little mouth couldn’t possibly chomp down on my chubby leg, but tell that to my paranoid, overactive brain that kicks into freak-out mode when I see a snake zipping toward me.
Spiders are another item on the top of my “not fond of” list. I never had an issue with them when I was younger. I was a dumb little kid who would crawl under the grain shed and play with them.
What was I thinking?
It was all fun and games until I discovered Daddy Long Leg spiders bite. Now when I come across a spider, there isn’t enough dynamite in this world to suit me. I think it’s the little black spiders that do the whole jumpy thing that I dislike the most. Why can’t they just skitter away like any other normal arachnid?
Pretty sure the 1974 song, I Don’t Like Spiders And Snakes, by Jim Stafford, was written specifically with me in mind.
