Like A Nightmare -- Entering A Room Full of Snakes

I opened the door, stepped over two  feet of planks at the entrance into the small barn -- and entered a nightmare.  Big black snakes were everywhere, running across the floor, climbing up and down the walls, and falling from the rafters.  I was startled, to say the least, and stepped back and fell through the door onto the ground.  I don't remember what I said, but I must have shouted something like, "Hey, this building's full of snakes."  They were chicken snakes, which are not poisonous but can bite.  I carried a scar on a finger from a snake bite I got as a child.  No doubt rats had made a home in this abandoned barn and the snakes had followed to feast on them.

We had enough land on the home farm to keep us busy, but daddy had rented this place from our aunt. The soil was sandy and well drained so it could be worked earlier in the spring.  We had traveled from home in a wagon loaded with plows and other tools and feed for the horses. I had opened the barn to store the feed when the snakes and I became acquainted.  We walked back home at the end of the workday but for the remainder of the week we would travel by car, including home at noon for lunch.

The farm was traversed by a small brook and there were several places too low and wet to use for crops.
There were plenty of snakes ranging  from coach whips to cotton mouth moccasins.  The last time I visited the place my  cousin was showing me his grape vines and I saw two large snakes, what kind I don't know.

Another adventure with snakes there is more fun for me to rememember.  We were working in one field and a farmhand was plowing in an adjacent field.  He had stopped plowing and was throwing clods of dirt at a stump.  Daddy yelled at him to get back to work and the farmhand yelled back that he couldn't because he had seen a snake and it had hid in the stump.  Daddy said to him, forget it, that snake is a pet; he won't hurt you.  The hand yelled back, "I don't make no pets of no snakes."  We had to find and kill the little snake before he would resume plowing.