I pulled into the driveway as the sun was starting to set, happy to finally get home. As the garage door went up, I noticed something moving by the threshold – a snake.

            Panic immediately set in because I have a gigantic fear of snakes. And now one was between me and my back door.

I didn’t know if the snake was poisonous or harmless – as if a snake could be harmless, I thought with a shiver running down my back.

            I sat in the car, motor idling, watching the motionless snake. Maybe it was dead, I thought.

            And then it started to slither. Not very far, but just enough to let me know it was alive and waiting for me.

            As I watched that snake, the irrational fears took over. The three-foot long brown snake suddenly grew to about 10 feet in length. I couldn’t see the snake’s head, but in my imagination, the head turned and the fangs were bared, poison dripping from each sharp tooth. The venom was burning into the concrete as the snake tried to hypnotize me with its snake eyes.

            I forced myself to return to reality and looked across the street to see if my neighbor was home. Arthur loves snakes and is my go-to person whenever I spot something reptilian in our back yard and my husband’s not home.

            Arthur’s rescued me before. My husband was out of town one evening, but he’d told me to call Arthur if I saw any critter in the back yard that bothered me. I went out to empty the pool’s skimmer basket, and that’s when I saw something black and thin swimming across the water.

            I pulled out my cell phone and called my neighbor.

            “Arthur, there’s a snake in our pool,” I said, my voice shaking. “Can you come over and get it out?”

            I’d barely gotten the second phrase out of my mouth when Arthur came running up my driveway, his twin 8-year-old boys right behind him.

            He leaned over the pool and smiled.

            “It’s just a water snake,” he said. “Perfectly harmless.”

            To which I gave a very logical reply.

            “Good,” I said. “Kill it. Kill it dead and kill it quick.”

            He told me that snake wouldn’t hurt anything and was actually beneficial to our back yard. The snake, he said, killed rats and other undesirables lurking in our back yard.

            “That’s nice,” I said. “Kill it.”

            Being the animal lover he is, Arthur got the snake out of the pool and relocated it to the furthest reaches of our back yard. That had to be hard to do when an irrational woman was screaming “Kill it Arthur! Kill it!”

            But tonight, Arthur wasn’t home.

            My husband wasn’t home.

            It was me and the snake.

            I had an advantage, I thought. I was in my car. That vehicle weighs 2,000 pounds, much more than a snake. One push on the accelerator and I could squish that snake flatter than, well, a snake.

            Almost as quickly as I thought about using my car as a battering ram, my hopes were dashed. The snake was right next to the small step up into the garage and the car tires would go right over the reptile and he’d be free to chase after the car and the driver that tried to kill him.

            And then I knew what I had to do. The only way to get in my house safely was for me to get out of my car, run into the garage, get the hoe and hack that snake to death.

            After five minutes of trying to talk myself out of it, I finally opened the car door, put my foot out and touched the toe of my sneaker to the concrete. And then the snake did a remarkable thing.

            It slithered away into the grass.

            It was safe. I was safe. No harm. No foul.

            I pulled my car into the garage, ran into the house and slammed the door shut. I knew that I’d come a long way toward conquering my fear of snakes, just by putting my foot out of the car.

            But between you and me, dear reader, I’m not sure I conquered anything. Let’s just say in the battle between woman and snake, hesitation was the definite winner.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.

I looked over at the table behind my desk and saw a stack of mounted photographs that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. On top of the photographs were some well-read Leon Hale novels, and I immediately knew where they’d come from – Russell Autrey, one of the best photographers in the state of Texas.

            Russell’s the Herald’s former head photographer, and he retired a few years ago. Back when we both worked full-time for the newspaper, we were usually the first ones in the newsroom in the mornings – Russell because he loved to drink his coffee in relative quiet and me so I could leave on time to pick up my boys from school in the afternoon.

            Holding a cup of coffee in his left hand and the computer mouse in the other, every day Russell would pull up photos, crop and edit them for the newspaper and the Website.

With each picture, Russell offered me advice about what the photographer did right or wrong, and I soaked up every word.

            After he finished his coffee, Russell picked up his camera and headed out the door to find a picture for that day’s paper. I don’t know how he managed to find a picture every day, but he did. And every one was a masterpiece.

Sometimes the photo would be of children playing in the park. Other days, he’d take a beautiful picture of people engaging in every-day life.

And that’s what’s so amazing about Russell – he captures the every-day in an extraordinary way.

When my Aggie boy moved into his own house, he asked me to help him find decorations with a Texas slant. I immediately knew who to call – Russell. He said he’d gather some photos for me, and his choices were spot on.

The first one is of an old house and a solitary windmill out in the country, both surrounded by dainty yellow flowers. Russell said he took it back in the 1980s. Thirty years later, the picture looks as fresh as it did the day he snapped it.

The next photo is of a grizzled cowboy standing behind a mesh fence. Only one eye is visible behind the boards in the fence, but Russell captured that cowboy’s steely gaze. The lines on that old man’s cheeks had to come from hours spent in the saddle under the brutal Texas sun.

The next one is of a lone rider in the middle of a canyon. The majestic mountains and sprawling desert practically overwhelms the man and his horse, and Russell perfectly captured that lonesome feeling.

When I got to the next picture, I recognized it immediately. An older cowboy is riding a white horse, herding cattle. The cowboy sits tall in the saddle, and his hat has seen its share of the sun, wind, rain and cold over the years.

This picture has been used in magazines throughout the county, and I’m so thrilled I have an original print. The photo reminds me of the story Russell and I once did on the new breed of cowboys in Fort Bend County. That experience remains one of my favorite feature story adventures with Russell.

The last print is a black and white, and it’s an old house that’s barely standing –paint barely visible on the weathered boards. Russell knows how to put just the right people in the photo, and this one has two riders – one wearing a modern baseball cap and the other wearing an old cowboy hat.

As I looked at the pictures, I remembered all the stories Russell told me over the year. My son grew up listening to Russell’s tall tales, and now he’ll always have a reminder of one of the best raconteurs and photographers in the state of Texas. Thank you, Russell, for allowing us to have you in our lives forever.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald where I first met the fabulous Russell Autrey.

           

Football games are underway, and that not only signals autumn but also the start of the fall semester at colleges and universities.

As young adults make their way to the financial aid office to see if and how they can swing a college education, I thought about how difficult it is to choose a career path these days.

There are so many choices, especially for those who love computers and know their way around the Internet. I came of age in the generation where what you chose after high school was what you did your whole life, usually in the same town where you were born.

You worked for a company for 30 years, retired with a gold watch and then sat on the porch, shelling peas, waiting for the grandkids or the Grim Reaper.

Times have changed. Today, government statistics state that millennials will have 15 to 20 jobs over the course of their working life. They can easily go from one career to another and never think about that gold watch.

There are times I wish I could go back to those early days and experiment with different careers. When I left high school, I had all kinds of ideas about what I wanted to be.

I was from a small town, and I wanted to see the world, but I didn’t have any money to finance that dream.

One career offered a chance to earn a salary and see the world – becoming a stewardess. Back in the 1970s, stewardesses – we now call them flight attendants – looked like they had a jet-setting career.

Television commercials featured stewardesses in cute dresses, hats and high heels traveling all over the United States. Some even traveled to exotic, romantic locations like Paris, London and Rome.

Sure they had to serve coffee and deal with travel-weary passengers, but the end result was seeing the wonders of the world for free.

I was living in a working-class blue-collar town, and I wondered what adventures were out there besides an oil-refinery job.

When I told my parents I wanted to work for an airline, they weren’t happy.

“Stewardesses are nothing more than glorified waitresses,” they said.

We know this isn’t true — flight attendants work hard, stand on their feet and might have to deal with a dangerous person. Still, my parents wanted me to go to college instead of right to work, so I went to college and then to work for a reliable company where I could retire with a nice pension.

The choice was safe. The choice was conservative. The choice was what was expected.

I always wondered how life would’ve turned out if I’d been brave enough to travel the world. Who could I have met? What could I have seen? Was Paris really as mysterious and beautiful as it looked in the magazines?

But the “what-if” game is a dangerous one and tricks me from facing my “what-is” reality which is pretty good. I’ve learned to accept how things are and stay in the present. The future is unwritten and the “right-now” is what I make it.

Besides, I wouldn’t change my life for anything. I wouldn’t be a mother to my three wonderful sons. I wouldn’t have the joy of finally having a daughter in the family and I wouldn’t know the deep love of being a grandparent. I wouldn’t have a spouse willing to sit on the porch and shell peas with me while we wait for the grandchildren to visit.

Maybe I can still travel the world. It’s never too late to start down the path toward realizing one’s dreams because plans, and life, change.

And as they do and the older I get, the more I realize I better start down those paths now rather than later.

I wonder if Southwest Airlines is hiring.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.