When Granmda Was A Little Girl - #33

Story #33 - Ditches, asparagus and spiders!

Close by our house there were irrigation ditches. The farmers who raised cotton used these irrigation ditches. As kids, we would walk in these ditches and they were thigh high or 2 feet or so deep. They always tall grass growing from them from the irrigation water that would flow in them. Wild asparagus would grow in them and my brothers and I would pick it and bring it home. My mom would wash the dirt from it and then cook it for a vegetable to go with our dinner. It was mmmm good! I have not eaten asparagus in years. I do remember as a kid though how good it tasted! The asparagus would be fat and juicy! I loved to melt butter over it and add a little salt.

You had to be careful when you went in those ditches. Snakes liked the cool ground. They were usually the water moccasin snakes. We also had to watch for tarantulas. Shiver! They creep me out! My other Geoff caught a tarantula and he let it crawl up his arm and across his shoulders and down the other arm. Yuck! He asked us if we wanted to touch it or hold it. No thanks! Actually tarantulas are very delicate. If you drop them they can die. I never had the desire to want to hold them! I hated spiders!

One day my brother Douglas was walking around to the back of the house and he almost stepped on a Copperhead snake and they are poisonous. My dad had shot a few rattlesnakes with his 22-rifle. Living in the southwest snakes were common. We were in the car driving down to Alamogordo and a rattlesnake was stretched across most of the road. It was six feet long. My dad drove over it. We quickly looked out the back window to be sure it was still on the road. It was and it was not stretched out so much anymore. The danger of driving over a snake was that it could wrap itself around the axle. You stop the car or pickup truck and get out and ‘zap’ you were bit! Not a good thing! Every now and then you would read in the local paper how a rattler bit a child or an adult. An adult had a better chance of surviving than a child. Those snakes are poisonous.

We also had centipedes, scorpions and Vinagaroons. A Vinagaroon looked liked a scorpion but it was a dark maroonish brown color and smelled liked vinegar. The desert had its interesting life forms. About nine months after grandpa and I got married we left New Mexico when his tour of duty in the Air Force ended and moved back to Oregon where he was from. The only thing I missed about the desert was seeing my folks. I didn’t miss anything else! I didn’t miss the dry climate, the dust, or the ‘life forms’ that crept or crawled!