Playing catch-up. Day 263: Beetle and snake.

Wednesday afternoon/evening (well, two Wednesdays ago, now), I drove to Clarksville. I spent a few days there and my next few Project 365 photos will be from there. I’m going back on Tuesday because MY SISTER IS HAVING HER BABY ON WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7TH. WOOO!!! Wow. We’re going to have a baby in our family. It’s exciting and awesome. I know I’ll be talking about her a lot soon, so I’ll devote this post to the family members already in our world.

Every time I go to my parents’ house, I am overwhelmed by the neat things I want to take photos of. As avid antique and oddity collectors, they’ve filled their home to the gills. They’ve had most of these trinkets in the same places in the same rooms for most of my life, and their familiarity helps to seal that house and those rooms forever in my mind as ‘home,’ sometimes even moreso than my own residence and possessions. But those trinkets are always new too. I’m always discovering a new object they’ve gathered up, or realized the purpose of a strange-looking cast iron item, or learning the history behind a carved figure that’s been part of the background for 30 years.

I posted a larger set of photos on Flickr, but I chose Mom’s dead beetle and snake bodies for Thursday Sept. 24′s Project 365. Several photos of these little dudes ’cause I can’t pick a favorite. She found both of them dead. The snake was in our driveway. It used to be MUCH larger and scarier and more colorful, and Mom knew it wasn’t native. Most people, myself included, would have recoiled in terror and shrieked until a passerby picked it up with a stick or something. But she took it inside to identify it and let it shrivel and harden. Turns out it was a rare boa that had either escaped or been let out of a neighbor’s house. I don’t know where she got the beetle, but she did apologize for its missing leg, offering as explanation, “I was trying to be cute and wear it on my shirt.”