The Snake
May came and the season was at an end. Most snowbirds had flown north. Soon Brad would close the market. I went to work one morning after my day off and Brad said, “I have to tell you a story about the snake.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said.
“No, you’ll like this,” said Brad.
“I don’t want to hear any snake stories,” I said.
“Really. You’ll have to hear this. You’ll really like it,” said Brad.
And so he began:
“Yesterday I’m standing here at the checkout counter and this fat woman comes up and starts complaining, complaining, complaining. Across the store, behind her, a black snake is slithering among the russet potatoes. No one else is in the store but my dad, who is trying to catch the snake. Every time the snake raises its head, my dad tries to catch it”—Brad demonstrates by waving his hand and arm around in the air—"and as my dad almost grasps it,” he said, “the snake flattens out and slithers away.
“The woman keeps complaining. Finally my dad grasps the snake and takes it outside the stand. He gets a hatchet and raises the hatchet over his head and then down on the snake on the ground, and up again and down on the snake. This whole time this woman continues her rant, oblivious of the action scene behind her.
“Finally, my dad kills the snake, the woman quits her rant and leaves. She never saw a thing.”
Real Florida
One late summer, a hurricane was coming. We were advised to evacuate. My mother and I and her apricot toy poodle, BeeGee, drove to a hotel in Kissimmee, safe in the central part of the state. The picturesque drive opened before me the natural, old Florida most don’t consider when imagining the Sunshine State. Rather than take one of the interstates, which run along the coasts, we chose to drive U.S. Route 27 from Southwest Florida, along the shores of Lake Okeechobee, up the center of the state where the land is higher, up the spine of the state; so, I got to see the real Florida, the one rapidly vanishing beneath the cyclone of new construction.
While we drove through Sebring, about halfway between Southwest Florida and Kissimmee/Orlando, an attractive newer town situated around big Lake Jackson, mostly we drove through lots of open farmland, citrus groves, cattle ranches and past tumbledown shacks with rusted tin roofs and rows and rows of migrant workers’ trailers and shacks. I remember driving past places like this when we drove to Florida with Mother and Daddy when my brother and I were kids, but since then have only heard Brad talking about it when he talks about driving to his grove in LaBelle.
Soon this will all be gone, replaced by villas and terraced condos and golf courses.
As soon as they announced that the storm had passed, we drove home the way we had come, again past the old refrain of citrus groves, cattle ranches and farmland—where the “crackers” live. We drove past zillions of lakes, farm stands offering free orange juice and boiled peanuts. (Southerners say bowled, “bowled peanuts.” Brad got some peanuts to sell “bowled” last year—they taste like lima beans. Marjorie Kinnan (before she was Rawlings) starred in the title role of a play called Lima Beans when she attended the University of Wisconsin.) We drove past more old shacks with rusted tin roofs; and in Immokalee rows and rows of shacks and trailers where the farm workers live. In LaBelle, charming tree-lined streets, small older houses, old supermarkets—a town that looks like the young people all left home after graduating from high school, a southern belle tattered with age. Brad and his wife used to live in LaBelle. LaBelle and Immokalee are about an hour north of where we lived. Immokalee is a huge farming community from which in the winter food is shipped up North. Look on grape tomato package labels in the winter or your early summer season blueberry packages. Blueberries are a new crop grown in Immokalee, begun experimentally a few years ago, after I left Florida, and seem to be doing well; they are plump, sweet and juicy. Sometimes when Brad needed extra hands at the farm or the grove he sent Felipe to pick up some workers in Immokalee. They stand on the street corners in the mornings looking for work.
Another critter that showed up end of season, by June and stayed all summer, was this big, brown grasshopper. They’re innocuous (like to eat vegetables) and they are crunchy. They’re everywhere, millions of them—all over the highways, so many you have to drive over them. They’re called a Florida lubber or Southern lubber. They’d sit on my checkout counter, nonchalantly, watching me as I worked. Several of them, not just one. They were all over the place.
By the time I got to, “And so he began:” I laughed out loud! So glad you had an audience. I pictured the grasshoppers gazing glassy eyed at your performance. Loved “the spine of Florida”.