If you live in the southeast I don’t have to tell you about all the rain we have been having here! It’s insane! Normally we wouldn’t complain about a wet, wet season, but when you get this much rain it’s borderline ridiculous. This much rain means you have mosquitoes the size of your fist and every creepy crawly thing is running for dryer ground which usually means into or very near your house! This weekend alone my mom and step-dad saw THREE snakes near the house. None inside, thank god. Although we did have a few growing up. **shiver** One was a white oak snake that was on the path leading to the pump house by the pool. My dad kept trying to shoo it away and it kept striking at him. Finally he got fed up, grabbed a hoe from the garage and chopped its head off. One down – fifty trillion to go!
The second was about a 3 foot black snake that ran across the front walk as they were leaving the house. Those are “good” snakes as my mom will tell you. I like to say the only “good” snakes are “dead” snakes, but that’s just me. She does have a point though, black snakes are non-poisonous and VERY territorial. That means they keep the poisonous coral snakes and moccasins out of our yard. This IS a good thing, but they are so territorial that they will chase you. Trust me, I speak from experience. I had one charge me while I was on a riding lawn mower when I was in middle school. Luckily it realized it was going to lose and backed down just in the nick of time.
They saw the third snake when they were going for their evening walk. They hadn’t seen each other in about a week since my mom was traveling working on her genealogical research and visiting up here with us and she was talking his ear off, blah blah blah (totally her words not mine!) when she glanced down and saw a rat snake no more than 6″ from her foot. She started yelling, “Shit, shit, shit!” and just up crawled up my dad trying to get away from it. And he’s going, “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” and her response is “It’s a damn snake, a damn snake!” Ha ha ha ha. Once again, this is almost verbatim what she told me. I’ve told you before my mother is the QUEEN of casual cursing. LOL She said my dad could not stop laughing at her and I’m sure the snake had quite a chuckle too.
Most often Mom will just leave a snake be, UNLESS it’s poisonous and then it better watch out! When my sister and I were little we lived in a small town outside of Tallahassee, called Monticello. We lived in the house that my mother grew up in, that was built by her father. Literally with his own two hands. It started out as a little square house and they added on to it as their family grew and they needed more space. Next door was the house my grandfather was born in. Literally born in the backroom. So when we were growing up my great-grandmother, or Ranny as we called her, lived next door. Jamie and I would play outside and both my mom and Ranny would keep an eye on us from inside either house. I was probably 3 or 4 and Jamie was about 6 or 7. Times were so much simpler then. Well, apparently Ranny glanced out the window and saw us messing with one of the bushes in her backyard. I can’t remember if we were poking at it or scared of it, but either way she realized there was a snake in the bush. She picked up the phone and called my mom and said, “Cindy! The girls have found a snake.” The problem was that those bushes behind my Ranny’s house tended to house one or two coral snakes, which are poisonous. Knowing this out the back door came my mother with a shot gun. Ranny pulled us back to safety and mom began poking around the bush with the barrel of the gun. Up popped that snake in her face and before she could even process it she pulled back and fired! Turns out it was a little ol’ green snake! Emphasis on WAS. The both the snake and the bush were blown to smithereens. Ranny said, “You ruined my bush!”
Mom never was sure if she actually killed the snake. It either was disintegrated by the shot gun blast or it scared it so bad that it took off without ever turning back.
The moral of this story, if you run across a snake you definitely want my mom nearby. Either for protection and/or comic relief. 🙂
**Coming up soon, “My Sister Vs. A Flying Roach” **