Hoop Snakes

Grandpa is easing along with a cane pole on his shoulder when up ahead a long, thin snake goes zipping through the short grass. Boys being boys, he gives chase. He dogs after it for a good fifty yards before the land starts to slope, and that snake latches onto the end of its own tail, comes popping up like a wagon wheel. Grandpa stops running, just stands there and watches as the snake rolls across the pasture, bouncing itself clear over a barb-wire fence before disappearing into some pine woods where a driving range now sits. My grandfather didn’t tell tall tales—he wasn’t that species of old man—and so I’d give anything to have been there with him in that pasture. If there was any magic at all in his own sad life, it happened on that day.