“Better than any other animals, snakes know the earth. Not just its layout and texture but taste and temperature, its dust and endless capacity for bitterness.”
Ghost Crossing Dean Paschal
When I was a young girl, my great-grandmother would regale me with stories of the old days- her sitting high up in a persimmon tree, hurling the fruit down at the nuns below. She’d be holding court on a vinyl covered couch in a small house filled with large antiques that spoke of a different time, one I could imagine while pouring over the pages of “Ghosts Along the Mississippi”, a large format book of Clarence John Laughlin’s photographs. Her hall closet was filled with National Geographics so old they didn’t have photographs on the cover- just a table of contents and descriptions in a beautiful font, mysteries outlined by a yellow rectangle.
Other than the cabinets of Jadite, lemon cooler cookies and cut crystal, I remember her stories. One of them was how after a storm had passed, when the fields were flooded, water on the porch, and quiet in the yard, you could hear the snakes, who had climbed the trees seeking shelter, drop into the water, “Plop, plop, plop”, she’d say. And I’d imagine, a tree filled with snakes like fruit; what a Garden of Eden- not one temptation, but countless. We may not have bedrock here, in our home built on silt, but we do have primordial landscapes that speak to deep parts within all of us that reach back generations.