By Jeannette Berndsen
SO, you get the opportunity to go to America, to live there and you seize it with both hands. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been fascinating and interesting. Literally everything is different here in America than in the Netherlands.
A few years ago I had an artist fair in Orlando in Winter Park. Beautiful park, nice showing and everything looked good. At 5:30 it started raining, time to hurry and pack up. My husband and I packed two paintings together at a time, all done quickly.
We came home dead tired. Sitting together on the couch, resting. We’ll sort it out tomorrow, time enough. My son, who was also at home, suddenly saw something slither into the room. Mom, we have a visitor. Really??
A small rattlesnake of about 5 ft with as much venom as the big one, we read later. Mom, what are we going to do with it? Don’t kill it, no, no, we can’t, uhhhh, with the scoop net we use in the pool, my husband and son went to catch the snake, one following it and the other trying to scoop it up. Gosh, what a mess just when we thought we were resting comfortably.
So we drove from Orlando to Hernando for 1.5 hours with a snake in the car… Ohh, no one will believe that!!
The snake ended up being tossed as far away as the guys could manage, from the far end of the yard to a vacant house. I hoped he would get a serious headache and never come back to those awful people.
See, this never happens in Holland, but it does happen in Florida.
* Jeannette Berndsen is an artist in West Palm Beach, Florida
