By Dale Welch
Did you say that you don’t like spiders and snakes? What about lizards?
In the very early 1900’s, my grandma, Ida Miller Clark and her sisters, Ova, Ollie, Stella, Lula and Beulah and brother Dee were walking about a mile from their home to the Cliff Springs Methodist Church. In those days, church services weren’t an every-Sunday thing. Each month, the circuit riding preacher would come and everybody would go to the Methodist church. When the Baptist preacher would come for his monthly visit, folks would go the Baptist church, a few hundred yards away.
As the siblings were walking along chatting and helping the younger ones along, a lizard ran up Ova’s dress. What to do? She wasn’t going to pull off her dress right the in the middle of the road on the way to church. Instead, she grabbed it and held it through her dress.
Even if the preacher’s message was short, it was a terribly long one to the poor girl. Ova held the lizard through her dress all the way through service and all the way back home. When she finally ran to her room and stripped the dress off, she discovered that she had smothered it to death.
During those years, there was just dirt roads throughout the community. If it rained, frogs and lizards and such would poke their heads out and look around in the middle of the road. There weren’t any cars at the time, just wagons and horses.
On another occasion, Grandma’s father’s first cousin Margaret Elmore Wilson was visiting their home from over at Lovejoy. The family was seated around the dining table, talking about how other family members had been doing and how high their corn had grown. As Margaret lifted her saucer to take a sip of strong hot but cooled coffee, a lizard popped up on top of her bonnet. As the kids started to point it out, Margaret felt it and slung the bonnet, lizard and all. It all flew onto the floor. That lizard lived, running for his life. Apparently, like little Ova, Margaret her picked up her passenger somewhere along the dusty dirt road.
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