Snake Sighting

If I were President of the United States and had been whisked away when my secret service agents were taking a coffee break, my kidnappers would only need to know one thing to make me talk.  Since the possibility is zero that I will ever occupy the White House and have access to anything as important as security codes or the key to the presidential china cabinets, I feel secure in giving away the secret.  It’s snakes.  I am totally terrified of them! It makes no difference whether they are poisonous or non-poisonous, long or short (although there’s more to be frightened of the longer they are), colorful or bland, silent or rattly.  They create an equal amount of adrenaline-rushing fear that causes me to run, scream, fling my hands in the air. . . in short, transform a calm, genteel woman into a crazed, out-of-control lunatic!

Where did this off-the-radar phobia come from, you may wonder?  Ask my children.  Whenever I begin my “snake story,” they shake their heads and say, “Yes, Mom, you’ve told us this before,” in the same tone I used with my grandfather when he repeated one of his “when I was growing up” stories for the 35^th time. (So, if they’re reading this posting, I advise them to skip the next paragraph.)

Once upon a time, when I was at the impressionable age of four, my mother and I were taking a bag of trash to a barrel across the yard.  Venturing away from my mother’s path, I stepped over a long, fat, brown stick, which as you’ve probably guessed, was no stick.  No sooner had I said, “Hey, Mom, look at this cool stick,” than she scooped me up and dashed back to the house.  My grandmother, visiting from her farm, grabbed a hoe, strode out to where the stick lay, and proceeded to whack it and whack it and whack it.  The sight of that wiry woman, in her shirt-waist dress, raising the hoe handle high in the air and bringing it down with such determined force on the contorting snake, is etched forever in my memory.  Not only did she kill it, but hooked it over the end of the hoe, then hung it (or what was left of it) on the fence. What a woman!

When we first moved into our house in Greenbrier, surrounded by 5 acres of woods and snaky-looking underbrush, I went to the local farm supply store and bought a container of Snake-A-Way, granules that snakes supposedly don’t like and won’t cross.  I was prepared to sprinkle it around the perimeter of our house, when our son-in-law, Ben, astutely pointed out that snakes might already be positioned within that perimeter.  Did I really want to take the chance of discouraging them from leaving?  Mumbling about the accuracy of his logic, I goggled other possibilities, then decided on the least scientific solution of the bunch. . . Boots!  Black, up-to-my knees, thick-soled, rubber boots.  And slow, deliberate steps while scanning right, left, ahead for anything that resembles the long, slender, coiled or curvy body of the dreaded creatures.

Having gotten wind of the fact that there’s a snake-hating woman living in our house, who goes crazy at the sight of one of their kin, snakes have chosen to stay away. . . until last Thursday afternoon. I was sitting peacefully on the window seat, looking out the upstairs window of the study, composing a perfect sentence for my memoir, when I noticed a stick - a long, black, shiny stick - lying in the grass below.  Suddenly the stick disappeared, then reappeared a short distance away, slithering slowly from the edge of the flowerbed across a patch of dirt, to the bird fountain, through the hostas plants, into taller grass, then out of sight in the snaky underbrush at the edge of the manicured lawn.  With a window, screen, roof, porch, steps and another 50 feet or so separating us, I was able to hold off the craziness and stand, instead, holding my breath, unable to move. 

 Knowing that he’s out there somewhere, maybe with a few of his buddies, all I can say is that he’d better keep his distance or I might grab my hoe.  Who am I kidding?!!