“Let’s go fishing!”

That was my granny speaking or my other granny. One granny would, laughingly, say she was pore, not poor.  My other granny had chickens and lived on a paved road, so she was better off.

But, they were as much alike as “two peas in a pod,” Mama said.

They both loved to fish and Pop, my granddaddy, was well-off enough to have two fishponds, one was little and one was big. So, any time my grannies wanted to go fishing, they went and they fished with homegrown bait – crickets, Catawba worms, regular fishing worms that we dug, with crickets we caught under field rocks and chicken gizzards that weren’t for Sunday dinner company.

Granny Maggie had an amazing red worm fishing bed. Every time she washed dishes, she dashed the dirty dishwater out the back door and that made a good home-grown worm bed. Both of Pop’s ponds, the little pond and the little-bigger pond, were down the dirt road behind our house. But, the little pond was mainly drinking water for cows and for catching tadpoles. 

I went fishing with my grannies, Maggie and Minnie, every time, except when they couldn’t put up with me.

Standing up to fish got my grannies down in their sacroiliacs.  So, they sat on lard cans most of the time and just stood up to throw their lines way out and fight off the big, fearsome water moccasins that would come, like streaks of lightning, after their stringers of fish.

But my grannies weren’t afraid of the water moccasins so they paid them no mind. They would just slap the dark pond water with their fishing poles until they beat the snakes away.

The snakes would come back like lightning again and again but my grannies would slap them right back again and again.

It was the water moccasins vs. my fearless grannies. To the winners, the spoils.

We had fried bream for supper and, as soon as the sun came up, we were back, sitting  on lard cans and slapping fishing poles at snakes and just having the best time fishing.