One of my earliest memories was the day I realized how strong my mother was. I was riding my tricycle under the big oak tree with the swing. My mother was sitting in a lawnchair with her feet propped up in another. They were those aluminum frame lawn chairs with the nylon straps woven for the seat and back. Suddenly, Mother yelled, “Don’t move!” I had no idea what was wrong, but I didn’t move. Then I saw it. A big snake was crawling between the lawn chairs, below her legs.

Now, I was just a kid, so my memory of the size of the snake could be distorted. That is if I didn’t have the chairs for reference. The snake was longer than the chairs were wide, and it was not stretched out straight either.

I don’t recall how my mother got out of the chairs. That may have been an amazing acrobatic feat in and of itself, but I remember that she was out of the chairs, and standing there with a huge rock. There is no childhood distortion of the size of the rocks. The rock is still there in the yard today. It’s one of a circle of rocks that used to be a foundation of an old house, a rough, roundish shape rock, with a diameter of two and a half feet or more.

Mother lifted the rock up high, and thrust it onto the snake. She did not carry the rock waist high, and drop it on the snake. She raised the rock, and from a relatively safe distance, sent it with some force onto the snake’s head.

When my dad came home, we we’re all excited to show him the snake Mother had killed, the rock still there on top of it. As he rolled rock back to where Mother had got it, I reminded him that Mother had picked the rock up. As an adult, I’m sure my dad could have picked up the rock also; there was no urgency in returning it to the circle, no need to strain back muscles. But it really emphasized to me as a small child, just how strong my mother was, when it was important.