Every night during the summer, I go out and hunt scorpions. I have to take a regular flashlight so I can look for snakes, and then I take the black light so I can find scorpions. There’s never a night I don’t find at least three. Yes, I kill them!
Scorpion
This seems to be the worst year since we’ve been here for rattlesnakes and I’m constantly on the lookout for them.
Vince had a saw he had never opened. It was still all boxed up in the original packaging. He opened it yesterday and it was full of ants. They had eaten styrofoam and tunneled it out and made nests. There were thousands of ants in that box. I told Vince “This is really a hard place to live!” He said “Yes, he was just thinking the same thing.” Yet we don’t want to leave Texas. There are areas of Texas that aren’t quite as hard as it is here but there are areas of Texas that have worse problems too.
I looked at Vince and said “Girls from Texas are just a little bit better”. We laugh because, as I’ve mentioned before, Pat Green’s song, The Girls from Texas a Just a Little Bit Better” states “Once you cross that Red River, you’ll stay there forever.”
With Addie, I can still say to her “The girls from Texas . . ” and she’ll say “Are just a little bit better!”
With Vince, I say “The girls from Texas . . ” and he says “Once you cross that Red River, you’ll stay there forever.” It seems most any way we go to MO or to Louisiana, we do cross the Red River and before we get there, I make sure Pat Green’s song is playing on the iPod when we cross the river.
So true. Scorpions. Rattlesnakes. Drought. I can see us living somewhere in Texas, maybe here, forever!
Nelle Coursey says
I would like you to live here forever! Because I don’t want to lose another friend by miles and miles.
LK Smith says
I am a native Texan. Fortunately, I have not lived in an area with all the critters you have experienced. I think you are much more brave than this Texas girl.
Susan says
Yep. Texas makes ’em strong! =) I grew up further west – mostly in Odessa, some in El Paso. In those days, there were cotton fields at the end of my Odessa street, and every man on the block worked on an oil rig. I walked through fields to get to school, and I don’t recall ever once seeing a scorpion. But in Arizona, I saw them all the time, and had a run in with a few of them, which was not pleasant for me, and very deadly for them.
The exterminator told me that the reason they can’t get rid of them is that scorpions don’t lick their feet like cockroaches and other annoying insects. So they can walk through anything and never be poisoned. You have to find their nests to wipe them out. But where you are? More will come, I’m sure!
Mary M says
Yes, we do have a lot of critters that make me squirm and I’ve lived in Texas all my life. But I think just about any place you go, there will always be something that you would rather not have.
wanda j says
I’m glad don’t have those kinds of bugs and those kind of snakes here in my part of Texas. Just have to deal with floods and hurricanes .We do get snakes copperheads mostly but not often cats do their jobs when them I think. But love the trees and water and everything else. No place like home wherever it is.
April R says
How funny! I’ve never heard that song and from Bossier City/Shreveport so have crossed that Red River a million times. I went to Texas after college but find myself back in Louisiana. I thought I would never come back to Louisiana when I left at 21. It is South Louisiana so maybe that doesn’t count as coming back. Totally different world than us Northerners at the top of the state. lol
Judy Laquidara says
Do you know who Joe Stampley/The Uniques are? Vince did not and I was shocked but that’s probably a Louisiana thing too and probably way before your time.