My Childhood Pets

DSP Blog Prompt: As a child did you have any exotic (i.e. those not indigenous to your area) or unusual pets? If not, did you have any pets at all? What kind? Did you give them standard pet names or come up with unusual and unique names?


Hm. No. But snakes as pets were fashionable in our household (at least until Mom come home) when I was a kid. Dad loved snakes. And in keeping with his I-wish-I'd-had-a-little-boy-but-you'll-do-fine attitude towards having a girl, he taught me not to be afraid of snakes. He did this by catching a little grass snake, tying a string around it's neck, and giving it to me. Then after I learned I could drag it about and it wouldn't eat me, he taught me how to pick it up. He taught me how to get bit. He taught me how to tell if it was piosonous or not. Since he passed away before I was old enough to handle poisonous snakes, I am still leery of those kind and won't pick them up.

My mom was horridly, horridly afraid of snakes, so this education only existed in her absence. My sister tells me that one day I had picked up a Tonka truck out of my sandbox (no Barbies for me, I'm telling you, I was sposed to have been a boy) and a snake crawled out of it and up my arm. She said that I just picked it up (the right way) and set it off in the gress, while my mother had coniption fits.

There were racoons, in the farmhouse, great things when they are babies. Horrid as they get older....the older they get....the meaner they get. And the baby fawn caught in the combine one year. Mom would get really mad if I drug home a coyote baby from the fields. The only thing I was really allowed by Mom to have was cats.

One of these days, I'm going to be Cleopatra for Halloween, down to a live snake around my neck.