Start To Finish

I wonder what Southerners call it when a situation starts to unravel and fall apart.  Where I'm from, we call it "goin' South," and my day started in that direction and it was all downhill from there.  Nothing big, nothing disastrous.  Just a series of glitches and hiccups from dawn to dark. 

Shortly after sunup, I heard the now familiar, "Fa-ye!  Faaaye!"  That old girl should have been named Rover.  I kept an eye out, but she hadn't come here.  Just a bit later, I was getting dressed after my shower when the smoke alarm in my bedroom started screaming, shooting the cats who had been snoozing on the bed straight up into the air and starting Bess to barking.  Since I was in the bedroom in the midst of this chaos, I knew there was no fire.  The alarm has evidently gotten supersensitive and the warmer, steamy air from the bathroom had set it off.  This does not bode well for the winter months ahead.

I have trouble keeping track of what day it is at the best of times, so when my Wednesday milk customer changed to Thursday this week, that was enough to discombobulate me.  We'd agreed on eleven o'clock.  She called just as I was ready to step out the front door and said she'd be here in a half-hour.  Oh, good grief.  She knows where everything is, so I went on down to the barn.  In the middle of milking Cindy, I saw Sarah's Jeep making the turn in the drive, followed by that rascal Faye.  Moving the bucket to safety and leaving Cindy on the stand, I panted my way back to the house and gave a breathless greeting to Sarah, leashed Faye to the porch, made a very brief phone call to her owner, and got back down to the barn before Cindy broke her neck in the stock.

The day was already shot, so it seemed reasonable to pay bills and do housework and get all the misery over and done.

Come sundown, I was ready to step off the porch and put the critters to bed when I looked down and saw this little snake.  I could see the brown-and-tan markings, but not the nose nor tail.  I went back for the tongs and put Bess in the house, just in case.  I was so hoping this little guy was not a baby rattler, but didn't want to bash one of the good snakes and needed to make sure.

Skinny as a pencil and well over a foot long, the dropping temperature had slowed it down, making it easy to pick up.  I'm not up on herpetology and still can't identify the species, but it was one of the benign breeds and so I put it in a safe place and told it to "live long and prosper."

Timing is everything.  Dolly is afflicted with ophidiophobia and freezes at the sight of a snake.  In her eyes, lizards are snakes with legs and it was an act of bravery for her to help Dave last weekend with the woodpile, which was loaded with lizards.  Had this little one come out while she was here, she'd never have left the house.

Bessie Anne is also affected by the nightfall.  She hasn't needed to go out at night all summer, but evidently didn't get business taken care of before sundown last evening and so, just to put the topper on the day, we had to make the trek around the driveway in the dark.  It was just one of those days.