Grammie Corwin and the Adder Snake

One summer day when I was perhaps ten years old I walked down the hill through the fields to Riverbow, the house where my grandmother Nina Belle Merrill Corwin lived as a widow, a trip of about three-quarters of a mile or a little less.  Grammie Corwin had a large garden of beautiful pansies which I loved. We had been out in the garden doing pansy maintenance and  had walked across the lush lawn back up to the house.  There we found a large snake at the bottom of the steps.  Grammie went back to the brooder house (where all her gardening tools now resided after the years of baby chicken being hatched there) where she looked around for a snake eradication tool.

She picked up a small hatchet and we went back to the house.  There she used the hatchet to whack the snake, but missed a telling coup de grace.  The snake headed across Route 110 away from the house, nearly covering one whole lane. Several cars came by and Grammie kept motioning the cars to drive over the snake, BUT NOT ONE OF THEM DID IT!  They all drove around the snake.  The snake, a spotted adder, got all the way across the highway then stopped and curled up, apparently worn out by its injuries and the trek across two lanes of traffic. 

Grammie and I went into the house where she gave me a glass of red raspberry Kool Ade which had been in the refrigerator in the beautiful wide-mouthed green ceramic pitcher she always used for Kool Ade. We played a game of Parcheesi together.

Later when we went back outside prior to my walking back up the hill home, THE SNAKE WAS GONE!  You can imagine how interested I was to head up that hill home again with an angry injured snake nearby!