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wife’s dark side
By JEFFERSON WEAVER
My beloved wife, Miss Rhonda, is not a violent woman.
Yet almost any day, I expect to get a call that my wife has been arrested for walking down the highway with a sawed-off shotgun.
You see, Miss Rhonda doesn’t like snakes.
To say she has a soft spot for most animals is an understatement. Few and far between are the beasts Miss Rhonda will not bring home to nurture.
Storm-tossed squirrels, discarded kittens and puppies, half-feathered fledgling birds, and a slightly brain-damaged owl are just a few of the animals who have had the last name “Weaver” attached to them, whether they liked it or not.
She has risked her life more than once to remove a wayward turtle from a busy highway (disclaimer: so have I).
Woe be unto the driver that smashes a turtle she’s trying to save.
I will never forget the day she tried to chase down a logging truck driver whilst dressed in nylons, heels and a silk dress. The trucker could arguably have avoided a big snapping turtle she stopped to help.
Had her car been a little faster, my beloved would have needed a good lawyer. This was despite the fact that snapping turtles are notoriously ungrateful.
Snakes, however, are a different matter.
Personally, I practice the same policy with snakes that I do with possums: it’s live and let live, unless the critter is really a problem or I happen to be hungry.
It took years for my wife to adopt a similar policy (for the record, she still won’t eat either one).
I must say I am proud of the fact that she practices the 10-foot rule: if a snake is obviously not poisonous, and is more than 10 feet away, she just shivers and leaves it alone.
But if the creature crosses her line of death, be it a moccasin, rattler, or copperhead, things get real ugly, real fast.
She knows it’s wrong, and now illegal, to kill a snake that isn’t threatening life or property.
Problem is, she doesn’t care.
Take, for example, the copperhead she found in the dog pen the other morning.
Colly Bay surrounds our backyard, and Colly is known both for the quantity and quality of its rattlesnakes and cottonmouths. The snake population is one of those things we don’t discuss in polite company.
Now, I hadn’t told her we had copperheads around the yard, because she’d just gotten used to the garter snake that lives in the pump house.
More than one snake at a time might make her nervous.
Anyway, as Miss Rhonda went out to feed the dogs and tell Sam the Hog good morning, she spotted said snake in the yard.
No big deal, she said to herself. It’s probably a chicken snake. Besides, it was a cool morning, and said reptile wasn’t very active.
Then it began moving toward the house, and that was enough to make her doubt her identification.
She didn’t think about the fact that we probably have plenty of snakes under our house, and that it was just trying to go home. She didn’t think about the fact that the snake is probably the reason we have so few mice in the chicken-feed bin.
She just felt the need to kill.
She bypassed two shotguns and a rifle to get to a shovel and a machete. Since this is a family publication, I’ll spare you any more details.
I promised, after that incident, to buy her a shotgun of her very own, something light and fast. She then speculated that I might get a call from a friendly sheriff’s deputy that she was going armed to the terror of the legless public.
Snakes regularly sun themselves on our road, and shooting them, as she put it, “might get good to me.”
The look in her eyes made me wonder for a moment what happened to the bunny-hugging woman of my dreams.
I was reminded, in a scary way, of when I introduced her to carpenter bee control.
Carpenter bees are the arch-enemy of old homes like ours; determined, destructive, and downright demonic, I’ve never known anyone to be stung by one – but they’ll eat a house with more enthusiasm than Sam in his slops.
An old and somewhat disturbed acquaintance of mine taught me the fun that can be had in shooting carpenter bees with a .22 loaded with rat shot. He uses them to get in shape for quail seasons (at least that’s his excuse).
As guilty as I feel about killing something I won’t eat, I have to admit there are few things as challenging or fun as an afternoon spent shooting carpenter bees.
Miss Rhonda’s introduction to the bug was a bit less enjoyable.
When she shrieked as one flew through her hair. I grabbed a badminton racket and nailed said bug.
And a sociopath was born.
She actually began to enjoy “knocking” bees, as she put it. She spent mornings working on her style, the backswing-and-stomp.
I saw the same look in her eyes when I said I’d buy her a snake gun of her very own.
I tell her snakes are more scared of humans than we are of them – and they have good reason to be scared of my beloved wife – but I’m not sure she believes me.
I guess I’ll just have to convince her that fried snake is a delicacy.
And I’ll pat her down before we go to that movie about snakes on an airplane.
•Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter.
jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz, or via telephone at 642-4104, ext. 227.
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