12/06/2020

This week we have more animals, but not very cuddly ones that you would want around your house and we are using the prompts of Alligator/Crocodile/Lizard/Snake/Turtle.

The first song that came to mind was by Jim Stafford but someone had already written about it. The second song was written by master storyteller, Mr Tom T. Hall.

Tom T. Hall and his wife have a farm outside of Nashville called “Fox Hollow”. When they purchased the land back in the late 60’s, they made a promise to never fire a gun on the property. As a result, their farm is full of wildlife serving as a safe haven especially during hunting season.

One summer when two of his nephews were visiting, they were exploring Fox Hollow and discovered a garden snake slithering into the water. Mr. Hall turned that experience into a story about a root-beer drinking snake that he set to music and “Sneaky Snake” was born.

In 1974, recording greats Patty Griffin, Duane Eddy, Bobby Bare, and Buddy Miller gathered to at the studios at Fox Hollow to record the children’s album “I Love: Tom T. Hall’s Songs of Fox Hollow” which included of course “Sneaky Snake”. (Read the 2011 article In its entirety on Npr.com.)

The video below also includes one of Tom T.’s other classics “Old Dogs and Children, and Watermelon Wine.”

Sneaky Snake
lyrics from Songmeanings.com

Boys and girls take warning
If you go near the lake
Keep your eyes wide open
And look for sneaky snake

Now, maybe you won’t see him
And maybe you won’t hear
But he’ll sneak up behind you
And drink all your root beer

And then sneak snake goes dancing
Wiggling and a-hissing
Sneaky snake goes dancing
A-giggling and a-kissing
I don’t like old sneaky snake
He laughs too much you see
When he goes wiggling through the grass
It tickles his underneath

Well sneaky snake drinks root beer
And he just makes me sick
When he is not dancing
He looks just like stick

Now he doesn’t have any arms or legs
You cannot see his ears
And while we are not looking
He’s stealing all of our beer

Why not join in on this Sunday blogging ritual. Head over to Jim Adams’ blog to check out the rules and read some of the great responses to the weekly prompt.

It seems to me we live less of our home life outside than we did when I was
growing up in the Valley. Everyone had a porch, usually in the front but not always. This is where people congregated because quite frankly, no one wanted to spend much time inside.

This picture of my grandmother’s house brings back so many memories. This house had both an open front porch and an enclosed back porch. Most porches had an assortment of chairs so there was always a place to sit down. We had couch-like metal glider where conversation was as easy as the rocking back and forth. Sometimes there were straight-back chairs with the challenge always being the art of leaning back on two legs, balancing precariously leaning against the wall. And if you were really lucky you had rocking chairs or a porch swing where troubles would leave you and drift across the surrounding mountains.

A lot happened on that porch. We talked, waved hello, and talked to neighbors who oven pulled up a seat on one of the steps to ‘rest a bit’. My sisters and I would sit on that porch in a rainstorm, often running to one side where the rain cascaded off the roof washing our hair in rainwater. It was the best way to have soft hair or so we believed.

This porch is where we sat together, three generations, and shucked corn or stringed and snapped green beans. It never seemed like work. We all just pitched in when things needed to be done. The best talks happened while stringing beans. That was when you heard family stories about long lost relatives you were never likely to meet.

No houses had air conditioning in the mountains and living in the Valley, it never got really hot. It could be humid and muggy at the end of summer. With maybe one box fan in the house, everyone preferred sitting on the porch. It was much cooler there catching the breezes as they gently rolled across the mountains.

A lot of teenage romance happened on porches, too. Especially at dusk when the sun had drifted below the mountains but night had not fully set in. It was the perfect place to hold hands or sneak a first kiss. It was the place where future dreams were born and fostered, generation after generation.

My grandmother had a back porch that was eventually closed in. It was just off the kitchen with a small table often lined with homemade jams and jellies or quarts of freshly canned green beans. If we had ‘company’ this was where the kids gathered to eat.

When my sister retired and moved back from Las Vegas to Virginia, one of her criteria for a house was having a good front porch for sittin’. She found amazing rocking chairs and lined the porch with humming bird feeders and a variety of blooming plants. When I visited there was always time to go out on the porch and ‘sit a spell’.

I love porches so much, I even bought a pastel painting of a back porch. It is beautifully painted with deep blues and greens that change as the light changes. It is my favorite piece of art because it reminds me so much of that simplicity of life. Not having a house with a front porch is my only regret about the retirement home we chose.

Maybe it is just my memories, but the world seems a softer and gentler place when viewed from a porch. In this Dolly Parton song, she describes this life perfectly.