Growing up in rural areas was fine if you had neighbors with kids around your age. Only catch is that many families own livestock and work must be completed before any play is even considered. Which was the situation in my case. This is how we learned responsibility. 1/11

My brothers and I were going to help our friends finish up their chores so we could play basketball afterward. It was a Wednesday afternoon, so we had to collect all the eggs from the hen house and put them in these metal buckets. Seems pretty simple, right? Fools we were. 2/11

Things are going at a record pace. 5 of us made it "light work" as we called it. That was up until we heard someone yell the one word that terrified us all. "SNAKE!" We weren't scared of snakes, literally. The fear came from the fact the chicken snake had swallowed an egg. 3/11

Now our friends grandfather owned the farm. He didn't play the radio. But we knew if he found out ONE was lost on our watch.... Keep in mind we're 9 or 10 year old kids. So we run up the hill to tell their granddad about the recently stuffed chicken snake. 4/11

First sign of our mistake was that he was on the tractor. He hears our yells and just simply looks at us for a moment. He gets off the tractor, takes his time walking down the hill and leads us into the hen house. We point out the culprit still resting from its feast. 5/11

"Mr. C" is what we called my friends grandfather. So in the fastest hand movement I have seen to date, Mr. C snatches the snake up by it's throat. Pulls out his pocket blade and in a moment beheads the snake. I remember thinking to myself, "daaaaaamn!" 6/11

He wraps his hand around the area just below the snakes midsection and squeezes the egg out of the now twitching headless snake. Took the egg and drops the egg in our bucket. Walks up to me and wipes the blood off his knife using my shirt as if I was being knighted. 7/11

Now maybe it's because I was the biggest of the bunch or whatever. Never asked. That was suicide. So Mr. C walks back up the hill to the house. He then skinned the snake, fried it, ate it, and kept the skin. He spent the next few hours using the skin to fashion a belt. 8/11

Not a Macy's designer belt. A belt that should have had a name. Like Excalibur. Or AssBiter. But as we did our best MJ impersonations after our work was done, we heard the screen door slam shut. Then we were saw Mr. C marching towards us. 9/11

The belt we thought was for keeping up britches had a different purpose all together. It was for whooping azz! This was the late 80s, so running was out of the question. Also, this was a period of time when parents allowed anyone/everyone to whoop you. So we took it. 10/11

After he finished,remarkably with the same amount of energy he started with, he looks at me. He then says, "son, that was for coming to get me to do something you were able to do yourself."

I miss Mr. C...11/11