God looks after young 'uns in the country, Ted. I am firmly convinced that kids like me had a guardian angel assigned to us. I'd pick blackberries, plums and muscadines barefooted, knowing there were rattlers in the blackberry patches, under the plum bushes and the muscadine vines. We'd run when we saw a big one, or step on one, and come right back the next day. I fished around ponds where cottonmouths were thick as flies, barefooted. Once I had my foot propped up on an old stump on the bank while fishing and began to smell something rank. I looked down right under my foot to see a big pile of cottonmouth coiled. I ran home, got Daddy's Nylon 66 Seneca Green and shot several times into the hole. I got a stick and drug out three big cottonmouths, gorged with frogs. We'd swim in the biggest holes on little branches and creeks with no adults around ......... some of the snakiest places around, and never give snakes a thought.
I'd swim out in the middle of the oxbow river lakes, in the Savannah River swamp, as a boy, on hot afternoons when the fish weren't biting. There were gators there big enough to swallow me whole and I never thought twice about it. But, one day while paddling up Herschman Lake, back to the landing, an alligator gar, half as long as the bateau I was in, came up alongside for a few seconds and then just drifted back down into the murky depths. That wound it up for me. No one I've ever heard of has been attacked by a gar, but this one was so big he gave me the heebie-jeebies. He must've weighed over a hundred pounds.
I won't be surprised one day in Glory to hear an angel tell me "I sure was glad when you grew up, you kept me busy as a boy." Hey, He shut the mouths of lions for Daniel, He can sure do the same with snakes, gators and gar. Great memories.
Lord, how I still miss my Grandaddy, after 41 years.
SRH
Last edited by Stan; 07/18/17 10:12 PM.
