13 July 1974 "My mother's cool handling of childhood crises was one of my first lessons in how to live. Once I was bitten by a black snake. Blackberry bushes grew close to the dirt road at Lee Haven, a house near Easton, Maryland, in which we spent a summer when I was about seven. Moving through deceptively soft-looking wild grasses that prickled my legs, and picking and eating as I went, I was pushing farther and farther into the thicket when suddenly I felt a blunt, muscular hit on my leg, a sharp pain, and in that second saw a snake's black body whip out of sight. I remember a moment of paralysis as my seven-year-old mind organized the facts. Then I ran, crying and calling for my mother, to the dark-shingled, frightening house (overshadowed by tall pines, never sunlit), up the white steps onto the wooden porch, in through the wide front door and into the central hall. My mother, in her light cotton dress and white sneakers, was by that time running down a staircase to meet me.
"With no loss of time whatsoever and with equally no hurry, she looked at the mark, asked a couple of clear questions about the snake's body, made me lie down on the black, horsehair sofa in the dining room, told the nurse to put some wet soda clothes on my leg, and called the doctor. I can see her now, dignified and reserved as always, with the telephone receiver shaped like a black tulip held to her ear." Anne Truitt Daybook