The answer, the building, the Coral snake

I stayed late in the office last night to work on my personal studies. I have no place when I get to the house to work in enough privacy to accomplish what I can at the office, so I will make it a practice to stay over several evenings a week to press forward on my studies. It puts me home late but the sacrifice is well worth it. At the very least, it allows me to make measurable progress, however small that may be.


As I was here yesterday evening, the bank president called me and we talked for about half an hour concerning our application to buy the eighty acres. He very kindly and almost apologetically reinforced what I have told Mama about the purchase; that it too much for us to handle financially. He explained that although the bank would not say “no” to the request, borrowing that much money on raw land would put us in a position which would limit our ability to secure the money to build a home or any other structure on the property when we might seek to do so.

I got the immediate impression that we were dealing with the right people. I did not have the heart to tell him that Mama has already abandoned that purchase and moved on to looking for land with houses. It is apparent to her now that we will need a place to live while we develop a farm and the availability of smaller properties with houses on them is proving easier than we originally thought: especially since we bought the latest Bowie newspaper.

We may still go over Friday to look at one such property but I have cautioned Mama that we may be better off to wait until we see a little more clearly what the economy is going to do – lest we end up buying a property that immediately has a diminished value based on market conditions. Land is generally safer than houses in a falling market but the old rock song that says “once bitten, twice shy” is true in our case when it comes to house purchases.

While we were visiting Grandma and Grandpa Kline, I asked Grandpa to show Mama the building he uses as a shop. It is a 40 by 80 building that once served as a general store and later as a saloon in a small south Texas town. It is early 1890’s construction. Its walls are not framed but rather floor to ceiling boards inside and out nailed to the wooden foundation framework and to the framework of the ceiling. There is no studwork, only full length boards, one layer for the exterior wall and one layer for the interior wall, and yet it still stands!

It has some of the most beautiful decorative tin lining the interior and where the tin has been carefully removed there is some intricate, hand painted artwork of vines and flowers that completely encircles the building. It is quite amazing.

On our way back from looking at the building Mama and Grandma were a few steps ahead of me and Grandpa when I saw a coral snake in the grass. They are beautiful creatures; dangerously poisonous but rarely do the bite humans because of their tiny mouth and fangs. Like a cobra, they must chew their venom into their victim, giving a larger victim plenty of time to shake them off. I called Mama back so she could see it and, of course, was instructed immediately to kill it. I mashed its head with the heal of my shoes but I am sure I only bruised it slightly.

It fled into a crack in the dry black gumbo of Grandpa’s property as soon as I lifted my foot.