Snakes

Today I plan to look out the bathroom window at the concrete steps to nowhere and see if the snake the bug man told me about is napping there in the sun. He said it was about a yard long and showed me by spreading his hands apart and then he said, "It's just a regular garden snake." He said he saw another one poke its head up out of the hole in the steps when he came out of the crawl space underneath the house. "I saw a rodent nest down in the crawl space but it looked pretty old. Probably the snakes have cleaned them out," he said. I called my husband to tell him about the snakes. I knew he'd be tickled.

I thought my sons would like to know about them, too, except I predicted Sam would refuse to leave the house again for fear of getting bit. But he just said, "Black snakes? Those are the good kind," and let it go.

I took a picture of one of them from the bathroom window yesterday. Its head was up as though it was listening. I think if I'd tried to sneak up on it from the back door it probably would've been long gone by the time I got around the corner. When I looked at the picture in iPhoto it looked larger than I imagined and smaller, too.

Steve says that a woman at work, Linda, told him that if you try to corner a black snake it will sometimes shake the very tip of its tail in the leaves to simulate a rattlesnake's rattle to try to scare you off. Part of me wants to see and hear this and part of me is convinced that the snake will chase me.

I remember a story that my dad used to tell me about when he was a boy and he and some friends convinced a boy to take a whip like stick and snap it at a nest of dozing blue racer snakes. "They came right after him and he was running so fast to get away that he got clear across the creek without getting his feet wet!" said Dad, chuckling. I could see the sun coming through the bright green leaves and smell the warm dirt along the path when he'd tell that story. I could see the boys, barefoot at the creek and I could hear the way they talked and the casual setting up of a friend to go do something that probably wouldn't kill him but would definitely give him something to remember the day by.