Brad Meador
  
     blog       music       about
Jul 18

Rattlesnakes and Relatives

Cheyenne in better days...FYI – the tag line for this blog is "a blog sometimes about music."

Apparently centuries of Australian breeding didn’t teach my Mom’s Blue Heeler, Cheyenne, that she shouldn’t go sticking her nose around things that rattle.  At the ranch this past weekend she took a bite from a North American rattlesnake and lived to tell about it.  There’s Cheyenne in better days to the right…

That’s not my story.

While talking about Cheyenne’s pitiful state, my Mom dropped this gem about my grandfather, Bliss Wilson.  Papaw did not like snakes at all, though his job as a soil conservationist in rural Oklahoma probably kept him in close proximity to them.  One day, on a drive back from fishing at the farm, he and Mamaw heard a loud buzzing in the pickup.  My grandfather, thinking it was a rattler, jumped out of the moving truck while it was still in gear, leaving my grandmother to fend for herself as it rolled to a stop.

Ultimately the sound was snagged fishing line being pulled through a reel.  No harm no foul I guess, but my grandmother still hasn’t forgiven Papaw for leaving her in a moving truck that he thought had a rattlesnake in it!