the solution is simple. You simply go shopping until someone that isn’t you, get home and can then be forced to search/shake/kick everything in the house to try to find the roach you saw sitting there earlier, as plain as day.
SNAKES
Louisiana has snakes, at least five poisonous species, last I heard. I didn’t bother to verify this information online when informed of this, figuring it was safer to simply avoid any and all snakes while I lived there. Ha.
You can try to avoid them, but if you live near the water, they just come up on their own to check you out. We lived in a big house built on top of dozens of four foot cement pillars, on a property that bordered on the bayou. The house was constructed this high because the bayou flooded its banks every time it rained, and our house was the only one on the block that didn’t have an adequate retaining wall.
Remnants of an old wall were visible along the waterfront, but rain meant that the water crept right up to the back deck the collapsed, sunk-in-the-mud wall. Growing down by the remnants of the flood wall were tall, messy bunches of leafy plant type things, a perfect hang-out spot for snakes such as water moccasins… cottonmouths, some folks call them. They are venomous, aggressive and smelly. These snakes smell they are mean, territorial as all get out, and they will come right after you if they think you’re on their turf.
Our house had an upstairs balcony off one of the bedrooms. I was sweeping it clean one afternoon and happened to glance over the railing at a big pile of dirt on the lawn below. Landscaping was going on and dirt was all over, uprooted plants, etc.
One of our younger cats was batting a paw at a section of black hose lying on top of the dirt pile, and I thought, who in the heck cut up the hose? Husband is not going to be happy over that…and then the hose moved and one end lifted and at the cat.
Snake. Black snake. long black snake, right below me, hissing at the cat. I screamed, of course, and then threw the broom at it like a spear (wondering as I did, if snakes could climb balconies) and judging my distance to the door, in case it decided to leap at me. The snake didn’t kill the stupid cat that was still batting at it, but instead, slithered off the pile of dirt and disappeared directly under my deck.
deck. The part that was right outside my back door, where I came in and out of a dozen times a day, my kids, too. Right there under which was wooden and had spaces in between the boards where an evil snake could possibly poke its head through and bite someone I loved.
I called Husband, who naturally said I was overreacting, and that the snake was probably gone by now. I overreacted a lot more and said I the snake wasn’t gone. So I went out the front door (which was on level ground, no deck underneath)to run over to where the neighbor’s lawn man was working and told him what I had seen.
He went and got a gun out of his pickup (nearly all Louisiana males over the age of eight have a gun, or access to one at all times), then went over to crouch by the back deck, squinted, looked, squinted again…he didn’t see any snake, but since it was dark under the house and the snake was black, “Well, ma’am, could be I jes’ don’ see it.”
“Well, guess not. Thanks for coming over with the gun and um… how long are you going to be working next door today?”
“Not fer long, ma’am,” he said, and then he recommended I buy boxes of mothballs and sprinkle the contents under the deck, especially where I had seen the snake go under, near the back stairs. “Snakes don’t like them mothball smells,” I was informed.
So I ran to the Walmart and bought four big boxes of mothballs, which I could smell even before I opened the box, yuch. I left them in the bag on the back deck for Husband to spread, of course, when he got home.
I never saw that particular snake again, but I have no idea if it was the mothballs that drove it away or not. I do know that they smelled so badly, it kept of us away from the back stairs and back door. You literally could not breathe for the fumes coming off those fuzzy little white balls, it took a month for the smell to go away.
That snake probably moved farther under the house, dug a new apartment and was settled in under the middle deck steps, for all I know.
It wasn’t the last snake I saw in Louisiana, though, not by a long shot…
LITTLE SNAKES ARE ICKY, TOO
In the summer of 2005, before we were hit by Hurricane Rita, we had an above ground pool installed off the back of the house. This pool was a large one, and it required the ground to be leveled, which left lots of big dirt piles sitting around the yard once more.
One pile was located next to the section of a new deck being built around the pool, which was going to connect to the existing older deck. In the course of landscaping and getting rid of these piles of dirt, workers uncovered dozens of little snakes, which they called “pygmy rattlers”. These came spilling out in all directions after they apparently hit some sort of nest. At first I thought it was a nest of baby garter snakes, since I had never heard of pygmy rattlers.
I was interested and went back inside to do an internet search on this species, thinking to myself, well, at least they weren’t baby water moccasins…
No, they weren’t, but my search turned up something just as eye opening. Ground rattlers, or pygmy rattlesnakes, yes, they do exist and are found in Louisiana and obviously right in my back yard. I ran back outside to stand a cautious distance away from the edge of the deck, then called out to the workmen…were they what they had seen were pygmy rattlesnakes?
“Real shore, ma’am. See, we was watchin’ one befo’ lunch, tryin’ ta wiggle down inta one of those crawfish mounds you gots all over yore yard? (I’ll explain later) Got a good look at it, pygmy rattler, alright. Prolly been nestin’ in that mounda dirt foh awahl, tho you doan usually see em dis close to a house.”
“Did you see where all those snakes went to when you disturbed the nest?” I ask anxiously, scanning the ground, the deck, the spaces between the deck slats, my toes curling up off the boards as I do.
“Why, yes ma’am, we shore did. They all went straight unner yore deck, ever’ last one. Funny thing, huh?”
Hysterical, oh yeah…. I’ll start laughing once I go swallow a few tranquilizers…
WARNING: TOXIC SNOW
Southerners are funny about cold temperatures and snow. First off, you need to realize that in southern Louisiana, it can still be 70 degrees in November. December might be a little cooler, like 50 to 60, with some nights plummeting down to (gasp) 40 degrees or possibly plunging to (another gasp) Not zero, mind you. Just freezing. 32 degrees. When one of these rare, cold nights threaten the area, with even the merest glimmer of a possible possibility there might be ice or snowin the morning, the entire town goes on high alert. People frantically run to the grocery stores and jam the aisles of the Walmart, to make sure they have food in the house, especially bread n’ milk, and firewood for the fireplaces.
On all the local news channels, the weather people look terribly serious and warn that school could be delayed or even canceled, and if you don’t to go out in the Killer Cold, for heaven’s sake, do the sensible thing and stay indoors. You do want to take chances with weather like this, they say in solemn tones.
There are dire little ticker-tape thingies running all day on the bottom of the television screen, urging you to CHECK ON YOUR ELDERLY NEIGHBORS…BRING ANIMALS INDOORS IF POSSIBLE…USE EXTRA CAUTION WHEN DRIVING…
As though a winter storm of historic,
