The Alligator's Lair

Today we ran some errands and went to our storage unit to get some warmer clothes and hiking boots and to put up some stuff we no longer needed here. Last night we had dinner at home because Josh cooked a big brisket and Mikey and Greg and Josh and Leetha and me and Sheila all dug in! It was great! Mikey and Greg leave tomorrow to go back to their ranch in Kansas. Me and Sheila still have no idea what we will do for Christmas but we would like to get out of Dallas! Not much else is new, Sheila is still improving and we may go for a short hike at a new nature center in Dallas tomorrow. When we were in our storage I found some old poems I have written and decided I would put a few up here from time to time. Hope they aren't too bad or boring! This is one I wrote after we went paddling our kayaks for the very first time at Caddo Lake. It was our first time in a real swamp with alligators, cypress trees in the water and Spanish moss hanging everywhere. It is so primitive looking we wouldn't have been surprised if a Pterodactyl came flying out of the trees on us! Hope you enjoy!

The Alligator’s Lair


Today we paddled to the alligator’s lair,
Through cypress trees dripping mossy wet hair,
Past beaver lodges, through spatterdock,
Deadly silent, but I heard they can bark,
Our paddles slice through stagnant duckweed,
In this quest to see a gator, indeed!
Too late to turn back, or even around,
Blackwater, my boat, it completely surrounds,
The weeds, the moss, tower above my ducked head,
So low in the water is what I most dread,
Pressed on in our search, the noises and sounds,
Of buzzing and screeching and my heart when it pounds,
The water, it looks like I could just step out,
And walk on it’s surface to look all about,
Then I see up ahead in the swamp she is trapped
in the knees of the cypress her kayak is wrapped,
I hear such a scream, then a scream once again.
Is the nightmare we feared about to begin?
As the screams and the splashing begin to subside,
I see she still lives, her paddle held high!
To strike it with might again on it’s head?
The closer I paddle it’s clear I misread,
The danger was not huge teeth and great tail….
as long as the boat and covered with scale.
The danger it seems was all in our head,
Just a little fish jumping and bravery was shed!
We laugh when we paddle that place now and then,
Remembering what nimrods we surely had been.
Now we still go, when it rains and it’s dark,
When the swamp closes in and in the distance they bark.
I don’t worry what happens if a gator we meet,
In a paddle for life, her……I know I can beat!
-yfp-