My own snake adventures- Part 1

Like cooking, an interest in natural history is a passion for a lifetime. I have my mother and father to thank for the latter. They bought me binoculars and my first Roger Tory Peterson field guide. They took me hiking and berry picking , and let me spent my March afternoons after school tapping the sugar maples behind our house and boiling sap to maple sugar. I spent days in the woods by myself hunting for showy orchis and other wildflowers. This explains, I think, how a fifty-five year old woman wearing a sun hat and driving a Toyota Tundra with a beagle riding shotgun on the seat divider, stopped traffic one November day on Route 30a near Indian Pass Florida to usher an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake across the road. It was a cool morning, and the snake was chilled and moving slow. I stopped a painters' van and a garbage truck.

"That thang will bite you!" yelled a painter, who now had a nutty old lady story to tell his friends.
"It's an endangered species!" I yelled back, and when the snake made the other side of the road my job was done. It is one of the perks of age not to be afraid of looking ridiculous while shooing the most venomous snake in North America across a road. For a woman this takes as much courage as wearing a hat! Another perk of age- unlike young women, old women know they are more than just their hair!