LM1190 That Water Ain’t Fit to Drink

LM1190 That Water Ain’t Fit to Drink

LM, Episode 1190, 3/23/23, (Remaster LM, Episode 118, 3/12/20) That Water Ain’t Fit to Drink

My Grandma Rowan had a well where she got her water.  A few years ago I was visiting my parents and, while on my run, I see Grandma out getting her water.  It was winter, so I ran down her lane to help her, saying, “Grandma, I feel better if you’d wait for one of the boys to get your water in the winter.”

She responds, “I’d feel better if you had a 9-5 job, but you don’t see me complaining.”

“Fine, break your hip.”

When my brother, Michael, turned 10, Grandma thought he was responsible enough to get the water from the well on his own.  He’s out a couple of minutes, when he comes running back in, huffing and puffing, without a drop of water.

When Grandma asks why he doesn’t have any water, Michael explains that when he brought up the bucket from the well, there was a ten foot long, poisonous snake on the handle, so he ran back in because he didn’t want to die.

Grandma says there are no ten foot long, poisonous snakes in Missouri and I’m thinking he’s going to screw this up for the rest of us.

Grandma goes to the well, pulls up the bucket and, sure enough, there’s a ten foot long, poisonous snake on the handle and for the first time in my life, I agreed Michael had done the right thing.

Years later Grandma said it was about eight inches long, but it looked ten foot long to me.

She grabs the snake, lets him loose in the yard and he slithers under the house and I’m thinking, “We can’t ever go in the house again.”

Grandma tells us it’s a garden snake and all the things it did for the farmers, but we weren’t hearing any of it.  Finally, she says, “Michael, that snake was, probably, as scared of you as you were of it.”

Michael says, “If that snake was scared of me as I was of it, that water ain’t fit to drink.”

Grandma was born on this day in 1905.  She would be 118 years old today and she never forgot that laughter matters.