Prompt 4 Great Snakes!

It's a kind of heat that suffocates you where wind blows dust in your eyes and whistles, but the desolation of the desert it ruptured by a rattle.  There are no cribs or playpens in sight and the first instinct is to run, but that's the worst thing you could. Stand still and search all around you at your feet, study the pile of rocks only a few feet away until you see movement on the rock ledge, but you still shouldn't make any sudden movements when you're in the home of the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake.

I've always loved reptiles, but I would have to say that my favorite would be rattlesnakes.  We have timber rattlers and copperheads in Pennsylvania, but we don't the beauty and fear inspired by the diamond pattern and the black and white banded tail just below the rattle.  Our snakes are boring by comparison.

When I was eleven, my parents took me away from building a tree house with my friends and a fairly successful little league season to head out west in a mini-van and the only thing I had to get me through the aforementioned boyhood milestones were the promises that we'd get to see all kinds of wildlife. I was strong into my snake phase then and what I wanted almost as much as I feared was to be out hiking and hear that rattle.  I wanted to see a diamondback up close.  For some reason, this was my ideal of the west with it's expansive deserts and I'd seen it so many times on tv that I just wanted something cool I could tell my friends when I got back (I didn't think Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, the Grand Canyon or any other national treasure were worthy of tree house stories...it had to be something better).

I eventually did get to see my snake, but it was behind glass at a reptile house in Arizona and none to pleased about its regular meals or audience.  I like different things about the snake now than I liked then, but as I stood there, a little closer to the glass than my parents would have liked, I watched its tail wagging violently, but not like a dog.  The black and white strips just below the rattle blurred a little as it reared up into the S-curve that I learned means it's about to strike, but I could move and I'm fortunate the glass was between us because I don't know if I would have moved in the wild.  It was hypnotic and I was transfixed in a way I haven't been since.

I can still see it and it thrills me.  I was frightened, but couldn't look away.  I still love these animals, I've watched specials about them being milked so that their venom can be turned into anti-venin.  I've had dreams about falling into a winter den of western diamondbacks, I've been bitten, I've gotten sick, but I keep coming back to them in my dreams.  That coiling S returns to my mind and for me represents the west with its barren hostility.

I feel a certain kinship with these snakes. They are coarse and dry. They warn you before the strike, but don't hesitate to make you pay for ignoring their warning and then they slide away.  I always though of them as solitary animals, but once a year they come together to hibernate and I feel this way about my best friends.  We too can be venomous, but once a year we must get together and share our vertical slit stares and warn the rest of the world that when we're released back into the wild, we're hungry and ornery and ready to strike.

My scales are bristling.  I missed out on hibernation this year and the exhaustion leaves my tail with an incessant rattle.  Hikers beware.  I'm curled up on my ledge soaking up the sun when I can and waiting for the next thing to invade my space to strike.  I'm not spiteful and hateful by nature, but given the opportunity, I can play that role now that indifference has evolved into deep rooted seething and frustration.  I'm hungry.

Place Entry 4 A little Squishy

I finally got what I wanted, but not exactly.  The snow that covered substantial patches of my yard while I ate breakfast this morning was gone by the time I got home from work. Seeing the brown grass fully exposed, I immediately thought of the dry grass around Scotland in the winter and grabbed a gold club from my trunk and marched or rather to suctioned steps up throw my backyard, dodging the doggy landmines that had for so long lain hidden beneath the snow.

It was a reverse mirage where I saw a dry and arid landscape and my mind fooled me with hopefulness, I instead brown speckles creeping up the back of my khakis, but did that stop me?  Hell no! A junkie, especially a golf junkie, knows no bounds, besides it's nothing a little stain stick and a Tide pen can't fix right?

I squished my way to the middle of the yard and enjoyed the soggy blankness.  At this point, anything was better than the expansive white misery.  The 61 degree whether felt like a bit of a tease with so much wetness, but it felt good to be outside.  A gathered a few of the balls that were scattered around the yard and started hitting pitch shots up and down the yard.

I only wore a t-shirt and a pair of dockers and I couldn't have been happier.  My boss asked me the other day if I knew what state I live in when I was complaining about the cold whether.  I told him I never knew any other state, I've never been able to officially call anywhere else home but with the forecast, I can be a little hopeful.  I'd played golf in hip waiters if I have to, but come hell or high water, I can feel that gold bug building as the neighborhood seems to come to life around me.  Golf balls pop up in the and splatter 30 yards from me.

Dogs are chasing each other in a fenced in yard a couple houses over and on the street behind my I can make out the subtle pock sound of a baseball hitting a catcher's mitt.  My neighbor plays college ball and must have come home for dinner or to have a catch with his dad but either way I can see a change in my mood as everything I love in the natural world is coming back into bloom even if it's temporary.

I chase the most recent round of golf balls to the other end of the yard and switch to hitting flop shots until I dig too deep sending a huge chunk of real estate down the yard and splattering my forehead and nose with a little much.  Even the earth smells fresh.  It's been trapped in the ice that it doesn't even smell like I remembered.  Everything is new again and the world has potential.  It has diversity, and as I round up my golf balls and head back to my trunk to put my club back in my bag, I see them.

They're faint but unmistakeable. I may not hunt, like so many other people in central Pa, but I know deer tracks when I see them.  I reach down to touch the compress ground.  A certain firmness among the sludge and I can't help but wonder what else I missed today.

Blog Prompt #3

I've said this before, my intimacy with my backyard and my whole yard in general comes from cutting the grass, but it's a disconnected intimacy.  While I pushing the mower back and forth or up and down the yard, depending upon orientation, music plays in my ears.  I kick clumps of grass that are too much for the bag and I know it's time to empty again.  It's really only on these segues of emptying the  bag that I look up and see what I've created with my yard.  Parallel lines on one side.  Neatly arranged and beautifully shorn.

As I scan across the yard, I'm very aware of what's still to come, an unruly bristling of overgrown blades of grass, desperately in need of a hair cuts.  I wipe the  sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm and the slickness of my forehead combines with the coarseness of grass clippings that have inserted themselves into my arm hair.  Even through whatever music is pumping in my ears, I enjoy this grittiness and I observe it other place on my body as well.  Right along the seam of my sock or just above the elastic waistband of my gym shorts or even in the creases of my exposed neck.  I know I'll carry this interaction with me beyond the actual grass cutting.

Not to overdo metaphors, but it's not unlike the residual effects of making love.  You can still smell that other person on you, intricately woven into your own scents and sensations from the way you sweat, once moist, blended and dried or the lingering smell of a lover's private parts.  It's never a constant impression, but when the winds shift or you reposition your body the essence of the encounter catches back up with you.

When you itch your face the deep aroma of grass clippings or sex can fill your nose or as you strip to shower you find stray clippings or strand of hair that is not your own.  It ties you to the past and many times the promise of future encounters.  I know it's crass to compare working in the yard to sex, but the sensations of touch and smell after both encounters were inescapable for me.  It's that sharing of fluids and fibers, that blending that occurs when we dry out and move onto the next activity whether it's the morning after or standing at the grill in the backyard waiting to flip the burgers or turn the chicken.  We dry out, we mix together, we share a little bit, and the evidence of our intimacy is rarely something visual.  It's usually a little more subtle than that.

Place Entry 3 Crunching

I should pick better times to come and be with nature, but I have to tutor at the private school I work at by night so, I'm going to have to make this count.  I'm sitting on the stump listening to the crunch and crackle of my neighbor pull up her drive way.  They didn't do any better clearing their ice than we did and now the tires splinter the ice like panes of glass.

The weather man keeps saying its going to warm up soon and all I can think about is what's hidden been this ice-scape I call my back yard.  A few brownish flecks dead grass dotted the receding ice flow like whiskers and it gives me hope--or maybe hope's not the right word, but it makes me believe that there will be an end to this eternal cold.  I have to laugh at myself even as I shiver.  What the hell kind of mountain kid am I?  I've gone soft.  I've gotten old.  That's what's happened.

When I was younger, my friends and I would spend all night playing tackle football in my back yard and the ice only made it more fun.  It proved your toughness as you lunged through the air and mashed the other guy into the ice.  By the end of our games the entire backyard would be shattered.  We'd have sore ribs and scraped lips, but we never complained like this, bitching about 8 degrees with snot crystallizing in our noses and our team down two scores.

Maybe that's the biggest reason for my whining: I'm alone.  I'm sitting out here wishing for action, for something to write about, but there's nothing and no one to talk to or at least be mocked by. I think toughness and my ability to endure nature requires me to have something to prove.  I know that doesn't say anything good about my individuality, but as I grow older and I have no more friends around, my sense of adventure and mental toughness has withered away.

I need to revert, at least mentally to a time when friends would still come over and play football, when I could tolerate anything as long as there was cup of hot chocolate waiting for me somewhere.  Tonight as I stand up and head for my car, all I have waiting for me is obnoxious girls who don't feel like doing their homework on their own.  Spoon feeding.