I like to try different wines.
While shopping at Sam's last week, I started poking around the wine section. I was intrigued enough by a bottle of Carolina muscadine to take it home with me. Highly recommend it... It's an easy wine with an unmistakable bouquet of the wild grape that still thrives around my childhood home, North Augusta, South Carolina, a bustling small town located just across the mighty Savannah River, and NORTH of, Augusta, Georgia.
The wine brought back a flood memories of lazy barefoot summer days, racing with my friends to play and gorge on the plump muscadines dangling from the tangle of vines twisting up the trunks of the sycamores and sweeping live oaks that rimmed both riverbanks.
Lakewood subdivision, where I lived, was a couple of miles from the river; but still close enough to barely hear the rapids.... a Siren's call to every boy within earshot... and a few brave girls
A twenty minute hike along the trampled path through the woods behind my house abruptly terminated at a point that features a mile-long stretch of sheared, ragged bluffs with sixty-foot drops, a maze of shallow caves, and the explosive roar of the rapids
All of the parents in my neighborhood strictly forbid their children to go to the river at any time.
Which meant we took every opportunity to head for the river. Whether we wanted to or not!
On one of those trips, I spied a cluster of ripe muscadines dangling just out of my reach. I got up on my tiptoes and stretched out my fingertips to the edge of their 12 year's of range.
I didn't see the copperhead until my wrist had grazed the top of his head enough to get his attention.
The recollection of the events that followed are a blur, to both me and the snake... but I know that neither one of us expected me to move that fast.
In the split second it took for the viper to strike his mortal blow, I'd already cut a 50ft swath through the woods, and was still winding out my top end.
The episode scared me so badly that I almost didn't go back to the river the next day.
