As A Blonde

I don't know if you all know this, but I am was a natural blonde.

{That's me on the right. I have no idea who the other 2 are. Sorry girls.}{my mom and I, circa 1976 - 1977ish. check out that big bottle o' alcohol in front of me! lol! oh stop, I was helping her with the dishes. I think...}

I don't know what color my mom's hair is/was naturally. She dyed it jet black for most of my young childhood, then started dying it a different color every month for a few years. Eventually she settled on a "frosted" look and hasn't really deviated from that since. My dad has always had blonde hair.

I didn't start highlighting my hair until high school. As I got older, my hair turned darker shades of blonde, and I enjoyed having a few lighter pieces in it to brighten it up. My roots were always darker though, leading many people to think my hair was not natural.

But somewhere between 30 and now, my two pregnancies, lots of yummy hormones and age have made my "natural" color a lot darker than I care to see, and so I regularly dye my hair. Sometimes I bring back the blonde, sometimes it's red, and others, a richer, warmer brown.

All of this is to say that while I spent most of my life blonde, I never really identified with the whole dumb blonde stereotype. My friends might say otherwise, but I don't know.

However, yesterday I had a huge "blonde moment".

I can't believe I am going to admit this. This is how much I love you, my friends and readers.

So yesterday I was in the garden, planting seeds. I was tilling up the dirt and mixing in some compost and with every scoop I was turning up earthworms. Big, small, fat and skinny, they were everywhere. Sometimes I would pull up a scoop of dirt and there would be 5 or 6 of them squirming around. So at one point, I was mixing dirt and I came across a little piece of egg shell. I often add egg shells to my soil to ward off slugs and to feed tomatoes, but I hadn't done that in a long time to this particular bed. I figured it was a piece of bird shell (we have lots of birds and nests in our trees) and moved on. I was churning up the dirt about a foot away from where I found the egg, and out popped a worm. It flipped rather rapidly and began to slither much faster than the lazy worms I had been digging up before. I commented to it (yes, I am the crazy lady that talks to the animals. I talk to plants too, so think what you want about that.) "wow, you're kinda moving like a snake there little fella." (yes, I do occasionally say fella too. Sorry) I watched him slither off and I noticed he had two little dots at the "front" end of him that looked like eyes. I thought to myself that I had never noticed a worm with eyes before.

(oh Lord, I can't believe I just typed that)

So...that was at around 3PM yesterday afternoon. I didn't think about it any more after that, but you know how sometimes your brain processes things without you knowing, and then suddenly, at a random moment, the answer will explode in your head. Like, when you can't remember somebody's name and then in the middle of the night you shoot straight up in bed???

Yeah, so at about 11:30, in the darkness of my bedroom, I finally put 2 and 2 together. I'm quick like that.

It was indeed, a snake.

I guess I never expected to find a snake in one of my raised beds. I mean, it's just dirt. I thought snakes liked the cover and protection of leaves and dark places. But thinking about it now, I supposed the soft, fluffy, warm dirt was probably the perfect spot for a nest of snake eggs.

It's a good thing I like snakes, or I would probably never work in that garden bed again. lol.

After doing a bit of research, it may have been a Texas Brown Snake, but it didn't have any dark markings on the head like what I saw in most of the images. It was uniformly brown, with little black dot eyes. I think it was lighter on the belly, but I don't really remember.

I think I need to start taking my oregano oil again. It really helped with my mental clarity.

And I need to go buy some more red hair dye.

Until,
D :)

Ah never mind, it most likely was a Rough Earth Snake. It looked a lot like this, except smaller. {not my image. I found this here.}