Gross, Grosser, and Grossest

Yesterday when I lifted up the garden cloth to check on the (non-existent, dammit) germination of my carrot and beet seeds, I nearly had a heart attack when I saw a dead snake glaring up at me. It was just a garter snake or something--we don't have poisonous snakes here--but its mouth was wide open and it looked for all the world as if it were about to strike.

Except it had been dead for awhile and baking under that cloth, so it was quite dry and definitely dead. No idea why it died under there. I chucked it over the fence, thinking maybe the chickens would eat it. They did not, and I was startled anew every time I walked by the damn thing on the way to the garden. I finally threw it in the gully today.

That's gross.

A. is even now filleting a dozen or so small perch he caught with Cubby in the lake today. No greater love hath a father than to fillet multiple tiny fish for his son. I was sitting out there keeping him company as the darkness fell on the nicely rain-dampened property when I noticed an enormous worm coming up out of a crack between the stones of the patio. Then I saw more and more night crawlers squirming up out of the cracks, like some kind of science fiction movie.

That's grosser.

Just as A. had started his long filleting job, I walked out on the patio and saw a small creature in the flower bed under the magnolia tree not ten feet from where he was standing. I thought it was a baby woodchuck or something, but it wasn't acting wild. It was just kind of wandering around slowly and pointlessly, despite the two humans and three dogs in the near vicinity.

I brought it to A.'s attention, asking him if it was a baby woodchuck. He was about to set Otty on it (his preferred method of despatch for varmints, you may recall) when he realized it was a poisoned rat. So I brought the dogs inside and A. thumped the rat with a shovel till it was dead.

That is OH MY GOD THE GROSSEST.

P.S. I wrote this last night, but then our Internet connection wasn't working so I couldn't post it. Now I'm too lazy to go through and change it all to the past tense, so there you are.