I am deathly afraid of snakes. I cannot stand how they look or how they move or anything about them. If I go to the zoo and everyone wants to go look at the snakes, I either stand in the middle of the room with my eyes shut and David leads me around. Or David takes me to the fish aquarium and sits me down and then goes back and looks at the snakes.
I do not understand people’s fascination with snakes. I mean, what is it about them that is so cool. I used to babysit for a family and their son had a pet snake. The two summers I babysat them, I never once went into the boy’s room. Even though it was in a tank, I could not even go in the room. And he had to keep his door shut because I didn’t want to walk by the room and happen to see it.
For the past three years I have lived out in the country with a pond in my yard and I have been lucky because I have not seen any snakes, until the other day.
David and I built a house across the pond from my parents. The other day I was at my mom’s house and I was walking back to my house and my 15 year old dog was behind me and I turned my head to tell her to come on and when I turned back, what was 2 inches from my feet. A long, I mean long, black snake. Let me tell you, I took OFF. I did not turn around to make sure Brandi (my dog) was behind me, I didn’t make sure the snake wasn’t chasing me. All I cared about was running and getting up on my porch. Once I ran up the stairs I turned and luckily both my dogs, Brandi and Desi were behind me and no snake.
Of course after that I am freaking out and I call David (which is still at work) and tell him I almost stepped on a snake and he tells me, well we really need to kill. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? I was the only person home, did he really think I was going to walk back to the snake and kill it? My response was, well you better hope it is still there when you get home, because that is the only way it would get killed.
The next evening I was cooking dinner and I happened to walk to the window and I saw my mom standing beside the pond, with a shovel and just jabbing it down in the water. I go outside and yell, what are you doing? Her response, “Oh, just playing.” Just playing my butt. I knew she was killing a snake. She said she saw it swimming across the pond and she waiting until it got to the edge and she jabbed the shovel in it. She stayed out there for about 20 minutes jabbing it with the shovel to make sure she got it. And then all the catfish enjoyed finishing him off.
The next week, I go up to my mom’s work to see her and she tells me that she found a snake in one of her flower beds. She said she was putting some flowers in there and her hand was a couple of inches from the snake. How she described the snake, I know it was the one I almost stepped on. She continues to tell me that she went and got a shovel to kill it and when she came down with the shovel to kill it, the snake started going crazy. She even held her hands up and showed me how crazy it was going. Thanks mom, I really needed that mental image of you killing a snake. Instead of her doing something with the snake, she puts in a bucket beside the garage door, which is the door that I went into that night when I went to her house. And it set there until that weekend, but thanks heavens I never paid attention to it.
THEN, Saturday, Mom and I went to get pedicures for Mother’s Day and we get back, David tells me, that my dad and he were riding the golf cart around the pond and they saw another snake. Thankfully they killed it before it went back in the pond.
So that is THREE snakes that they killed in 10 days. And then Sunday I’m going over to mom’s house and look in the pond and run into my mom’s house yelling, there is another snake. And here she comes running out with her shovel. Come to find out my dad thought it would be a good idea to throw the two snakes they killed in the pond so the catfish could eat them. Seriously Dad, did you really have to throw them in the pond so I could once again see them.
Needless to say, we are going to the pound this weekend to buy us a cat. Supposedly cats keep snakes away. So what does that mean…I’m getting me a cat!
0 comments:
Post a Comment