One sunny but chilly Oct afternoon my brother and I were moving the sheep herd from one pasture to another. We were familiar with snakes and kept a pet one in the house every summer and then turned it loose in the fall (a practice dictated by my Mother and a condition of bringing one in the house to begin with).
On this particular Oct. day we found a snake curled up on a big flat rock on the stone fence. I, to this day, don't know what possessed us but we hit this snake over the head with a stick and carried him back to the truck on the stick--where we put it in a gallon jug used for drinking water.
When we got home we had decided we would "pickle" the poor fellow and then take him to school. We took the top off the jug and started to pour rubbing alcohol over him--which revived him immediately. We were outside the milk house on a low retaining wall. The snake ended up falling into the walkway between the milk house and the retaining wall---at about the same time my father arrived. It took him no time at all to take charge---the snake was a copperhead. After a stern talking to the snake was back in the "pickle jar" for good.
That snake "lived" in a jar in the biology lab for many many years.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis
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