Snakes

Mice do not alarm me. Spiders, bugs, worms I am fine with. But snakes, I despise. I have been blessed this summer. The only snakes I have seen were caged, in a pet store, or dead, on a highway. In fact, the highway snake was so dead and had been squashed so many times by traffic that he was barely discernable from the pavement itself, just the way I like to find a snake.

There is something sneaky about snakes slithering through the grass. You don't know they are there until you have almost stepped on them. Their ugly little tongue flicks in and out, and they just aren't one bit trustworthy, in my estimation. I dislike the wiggling they do with their spine in order to move. I don't even like looking at pictures of snakes in a book. They give me the shivers.

When I lived on a farm as a young girl I rarely went out of my mother's yard (where one did occaisionally see a snake, but she was usually close enough to run it over with the lawnmower or chop it into little pieces with a shovel) without some weapon to rely on. Usually this weapon was a pitchfork. I remember walking along the lake with a pitchfork and one of my friends on a warm spring afternoon. After we had walked along the mucky shore (there wasn't much sand because we had received much rain that year) for about a half mile my friend suddenly inquired exactly why was I carrying a rusty pitchfork? I replied confidently, "To ward off snakes."

"Like that one there?" she asked. I looked over in the reeds, and sure enough, not three feet away was a snake. I forgot completely that I was even carrying a pitchfork and began screaming at the top of my lungs, draggging my friend and the pitchfork through the lake at a frenzied, hysterical pace. She eventually lost her footing and fell face first into the water, and I went down with her. There we were, both of us soaking wet. I don't know whatever happened to the sly little reptile, but she refrained from ever mentioning the word snake again when she saw me walking around with a pitchfork.