Aggrievement

During the long summer months, I spent much time outside--watering, weeding, mowing, filling the birdbath and a few birdfeeders I keep going all year round.  This summer, the summer of pandemic, I added a new activity–walking in the yard while talking on my cell phone. Walking added steps to my Fitbit and allowed me to work off the agitation the phone calls often provoked.

One sunny Sunday as I walked by my front steps, I looked down and saw a snake uncomfortably close to my foot. Not a small snake, but a long, thick snake with yellow stripes.  His reaction was not to slither away, but to stay put and raise himself up, head first, like a replica of those snake-charmers’ snakes in the baskets I remembered from childhood cartoons. I was not laughing,

Snakes top my list of most-hated creatures.  At the sight of a snake, my stomach sickens and my hands sweat.  My automatic impulse is to scream and run as far away as possible.  As a child, when I saw a snake while hiking with my family, I erupted into limp sobs.  As a young adult, I learned to co-exist with snakes while working as a camp counselor.  When we saw a snake on the trail, I calmly told the girls to wait until it moved into the woods, to not throw rocks or shriek or hit it with a stick. 

This snake, probably a garter snake, thought he had a perfect right to live in my yard and to come out on hot days for sunbathing.  Despite my sharp shout, he defiantly squeezed his scaly body more tightly against the side of the flagstone step.  Rooted, I could not bring myself to walk over him and up the stairs to the front door.

Eventually I did walk around him and went indoors to inform my husband.  “Do something,” I said.  “Well, what should I do?”  “I don’t know, just make him leave.” After a quick look outside, he dialed his phone.  Minutes later he announced there are no poisonous snakes native to this area, according to the local fire department.  They thought we might capture him in one of those have-a-heart metal cages and release him somewhere distant from the house.

Later still, my husband returned from the hardware store with a bag of Snake B Gon. By then there was no sign of the snake, but I armed myself with the hula hoe and donned my heavy hiking shoes.  I scattered those granules around the entire perimeter of the house. For days after the snake encounter, I told the story to everyone -- the zoom book club, my daughter in a text, my neighbor (six feet away in her yard), my biologist friend (who felt sorry for the snake).  I could not shake the image of his forked tongue, flicking in and out of his mouth, his cold, beady eyes, locked on mine, my own sense of unease.

Kathy Miller is a retired educator/counselor who lives with her husband and two black cats in upstate New York. Kathy’s writing focuses primarily on creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the online version of The New York Times’ Tiny Love Stories and The Ponder Review.