Sweetwater Reporter Rattlesnake Roundup
Harvey Oswald Jr.

Grass snakes can be dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. A couple had a lot of potted plants, and during a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing in a lot of them indoors to protect then from a possible freeze. A little green snake was hidden in one of them and when it was sufficiently warmed up, it came slithering out and went under the sofa and the wife saw it and let out a big scream.

The husband was taking a shower but, when he heard his wife scream, ran naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the sofa. He got down on the floor to look for it. About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he fainted. His wife thought he had a heart attack, so she called an ambulance.

The attendants rushed in and loaded him on the stretcher and started carrying him out. About that time the snake came out from the sofa. The EMT saw it and dropped the stretcher. That’s when the man broke his leg and why he is in the hospital.
The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor man. He volunteered to capture the snake, so he armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch. Soon he decided it was gone.

The wife sat down on the sofa in relief. But as her hand dangled in between the cushions, she felt the snake. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa, and the neighbor man tried to use his long forgotten CPR skills.
The neighbor’s wife, who had been at the grocery store, saw her husband’s mouth on the woman’s and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, an injury calling for hospitalization.

The noise woke the woman from her dead faint. She saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed he had been bitten by the snake. She went to the kitchen, brought back a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man’s throat.

By now the police had arrived. They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey and listened as the two women tried to explain how it all happened over a little green snake. They called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife. That put the woman and the snake right back in worse shape than they were in. Now tell me about your bad day.

This article “Sweetwater Reporter Rattlesnake Roundup” by Harvey Oswald Jr. was excerpted from: time2smile.com website. October 2000. It may be used for study & research purposes only.

This article may not be written by an Apostolic author, but it contains many excellent principles and concepts that can be adapted to most churches. As the old saying goes “Eat the meat. Throw away the bones.”