“You’d better remove all these tires before the campers come,” Sister Kathy instructed us. “They create a poisonous snake habitat!”

Ian and I listened with an almost patronizing level of bemusement, knowing that neither one of us had much intention of following through on her commands.

Looking back, I regret our thoughts at this time and how little notice we were taking of Sr. Kathy’s advice and 40 years of experience living on this mountain ridge. Our youth was showing itself. And it caused us to not head her thoughtful advice, to tragic results for our livestock.

Those tires were growing our potato experiments and, to us, seemed perfectly fine right where they were. Besides, the dramatic stories we’d heard of dangerous copperheads in our area rarely seemed to match up with the dangerous-snake-less reality around us, and we designated copperhead into the “mythological folklore” part of our brain, to the point where we almost saw them as a figment in the imagination of the Sister we were living with.

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