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The nights are getting longer

It’s really and truly Fall now – I picked the blackberries today. Just a couple of pounds. We’re short of freezer space.

When I was a kid, I hated it when Mother announced she was making a blackberry cobbler. It meant I was going to have to go pick blackberries and that’s where the rattlesnakes were.

I’m sure you know this, but for the sake of them in the back, there are no vegetarian snakes. Snakes it the little creatures who eat the fruit and a blackberry bramble is their favorite place.

To be fair, the rattlesnakes we get in Middle Tennessee are mountain rattlers – short and fat and shy. In all my years on that farm I only ever saw one, and it was sunning itself in the front yard. My boyfriend shot it and my mother the proto-hippie made us cook it and eat it.

But I’m sure I’ve told that story.

I saw a cottonmouth in the pond once, too. It was swimming with about six inches of its body stuck up out of the water, like the cobra on King Tut’s hat. Creepy.

But hoo my dad had some stories about aggressive copperheads in the mountains!

September 7, 2022 — 6:58 pm
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