Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Snake in the Grass

I'm not afraid of snakes. Really. Except maybe an anaconda. And maybe a king cobra. And, okay, maybe a little black snake when it jumps out of my suitcase and on my arm. That really happened once.
We went on vacation to Orlando with some friends when Lucy was a baby, and when we got home to Valdosta I was unpacking and a snake jumped out of the bag. Like this.
Okay, not really, but isn't that what we all think is going to happen? Spiders too.
I screamed and flailed and grabbed the closest shoe to inflict some serious shoe-smashing damage on that poor thing. Shawn was at work and I was too afraid to touch a dead snake and move it, so I just left it on the carpet in our bedroom. Every half an hour or so I would go back and check on it, just to make sure it was still there. And it was... until it WASN'T. Where did it go? How could it have come back to life two hours after I smashed its skull in (do snakes have skulls?)? We had floor vents in that house, and I guess it slithered its little mostly-dead self into the crawl space below the house. I never smelled dead snake in the vent, so that's my best theory. But you can bet for the ENTIRE rest of the time we lived in that house, I checked the bed first under the covers before I could crawl in.
So today, my neighbor was over and showed me a cicada husk in the tree in our front yard. Then she pointed out a black snake on the next limb. I kinda freaked out and called Shawn over to chop it to pieces. He knocked it out of the tree and then smushed it with a piece of wood from the garage. I was safely about a block away so it wouldn't somehow jump on me. It was all wiggly after it was dead so I made him do an extra chop for good measure, then he threw it in the backyard in the brush.
Isn't that gross, how it's all mushed in the middle? I was a little fascinated, but I told Shawn it was grounds for the D-word if he threw it at me while I was taking the picture. Because I KNOW he was thinking it.

2 comments:

  1. A couple of weeks ago, I scared a couple of snakes out of the compost heap when I was turning it... they startled me, but I let them live. I think I'd rather have snakes in the garden than mice.

    I still make sure and look closely when I'm down on that end of the yard though...

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  2. now see if he threw it at me, I'd have said the "F" word. You are a far better Christian then I :) LOL

    and please tell me that wasn't the trip you came with us! LOVE YOU. Don't Love Snakes.

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