Just before high school my family moved from Texas to urban Pennsylvania. I missed the horses and farm life terribly, but made the best with what was available. From Grains of Golden Sand:"I became a passionate amateur herpetologist and kept dozens of snakes, lizards, and feed-mice in the family dining room. I housed them in aquariums, cages, boxes, and one glass-fronted closet, generously given to me for “the critters.” Although still in high school, I audited university courses on botany, herpetology, and entomology.
"I wandered the town, stripping fruit from trees bowed down with the season—dozens of varieties of apples, pears, and cherries, along with raspberries, blackberries, and grapes. Pennsylvania honed my interest in survival skills. Where Texas had little wild provender, Pennsylvania made up for it in an abundant array of edible foods on the green slopes surrounding the town. I ate fiddlehead ferns, dandelion buds, lambs-quarters, Indian cucumber-root, and made salt by scorching colt’s foot leaves.
“Pretend you’re in the bush,” I told my family and served cottontail rabbit (found dead on the road that morning), miniature wild strawberries, and cattail-pith salad. As they picked at the food, the single comment came from my baby sister. “Mommy, if I die, please don’t let her cut me up like she did the poor bunny.”
The above image is me with a boa constrictor, which was a prop in the senior class play, You Can't Take it with You. I snuck the snake into the school a week ahead of time, and carried it around the halls on my neck, in defiance of the rules. I was only one step ahead of the principle's wrath, who heard about it, but couldn't find the animal. I kept moving it from locker to locker, and the teachers covered for me.
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