March Plus Day 93 CJSM

 

March

 

Grey-white puffs scudder across cerulean sky

Winter-hold relents as springtime-warm is nigh

 

Blustery cold winds howl threatening fury-snow

Sun’s continued warming belies faux forceful show

 

Onward marches longer-light of each new day

Warming-season refuses to hold rebirth at bay

 

Grey shadows soften as reticent buds grow bigger

Newborn foals run helter-skelter abandoned-vigor

 

At last time has arrived for rest to be soon over

Pastures come green with new sprouts of clover

 

The echoes “Ides of March” remind men’s souls

Rein-in, re-define ego’s most evil selfish goals

 

At rainbow’s end is sought elusive pot-o-gold

St. Patrick taught Ireland way-to-live quite bold

 

Though over time-again we tend forget life’s true lesson

Your Father purely loves you; His Son be thou blessin’

 

Embracing “Grace” of the Holy Ghost secures every man

When thee accept and live it, then thou doth understand

 

Amen!

 

 

Plus:

 

 

 

Day 93

 

When Dad is away on business, Grandma Dorothy and

Beth are in and out of the back room of the basement

getting toys & games. Suddenly, they see a copperhead

on the floor by the dryer. It had slid down the dryer hose,

busted through it and landed on the basement floor.

 

“They travel in pairs!” Yeah! They sure enough do, and, that’s no “ole wives” tale.

 I was out of town on business and Candy’s parents were at our hour visiting; our basement was finished with a family room which also served as a library housing our growing book collection on shelves and a nine-foot fireplace faced with old bricks we dug out of a wall in a store in Maeystown, where we eventually moved nearby, and the focal point was an eight-foot log taken from a cabin built in the eighteen hundreds; a friend and I took a hydraulic jack to the site. We raised one end of the heavy building once I had chosen the appropriate log for our new home’s basement fireplace. Once lifted so that the opposite end rested in its “wedge-lock” as it had been laid a century earlier, I swung out the free end; we placed a large limestone rock in the void where the log had been on that end. Then, we lowered the log and it hung free, tethered in its original cradle in the other end. Going to the tight end, we repeated the process, freeing the enormous oak log. We placed another rock in the void in that end and took the freed log home.

 I unloaded that log into the basement of our new home; it was a walk-out on the west end. The house sat on a bluff overlooking the Illinois bottoms; one could see the Mississippi River from it and thirty miles into the state of Missouri. I treated that old log for termites, a vacant effort as the wood had dried naturally and was nearly as hard as concrete.  Shortly, I built an in-ground swimming pool off the patio; that fireplace sported a built-in bar-b-que on the outside of the brick fireplace with the unique mantle which was that oak log from the old cabin. Anyway…

 The back half of the basement was used for storage of toys and odds and ends; I had a re-loading room in another part of the living space where I worked on my shooting hobby.

 Beth and her Grandma were fetching toys and games and puzzles out of the storage area when the matron stopped dead in her tracks---laying on the floor in front of the dryer…a copperhead snake, two and a half feet long.

Candy saw her mother’s surprised and shocked facial expression, then spied the copperhead.

“Oh! Mom! You and Beth laid that there to play a trick on me!” She incorrectly surmised.

Quick enough, she realized that the snake was real---and…alive.

 Candy’s Dad, being knowledgeable in the area of “natural” phenomena, realized that the pit vipers always travel in pairs; that determination is accurate. Whenever one of the serpents is encountered, sure enough, a mate will be very close by. He dispatched the evil snake and then they set forth checking every box and hiding place in the basement for the mate. No luck!

But, the “old wives’ tale” of “they always travel in pairs” was soon enough vindicated.

The following spring, our Beth had a friend come over to play on a Saturday. The two girls found a baby bird which could not yet fly; they “housed” it in a small alcove at the base of a retaining wall I had constructed along the north side of out garage.

 Suddenly, Candy heard a blood-curdling scream from the two girls; so did I. We met at the wall where the two girls were standing, horrified, pointing at the alcove.

 A copperhead had caught the fledgling bird and eaten it. I killed the “burglar”.

Ah! Cookie Jar “slithery” Sweet Memories!