So, remember a couple of weeks ago when
I mentioned that not cutting your grass attracts snakes? I wasn’t joking.
About a month ago, after not cutting my grass for like a month because my
lawnmower broke down and I had to take it into Sears for repairs (Long story
short: the Sears guy had to remove a large rock from inside the mower. No, I
don’t understand it either.), I string-trimmed a snake. Don’t worry, I didn’t
kill it. I think I stunned it though, because it just sat there and looked at
me like – well, like I’d just walked up and shoved the business end of a string
trimmer in its face, because that is exactly what I had done.
I stood there and stared at it like an idiot because that’s
what I do when I see a snake. It stared back, because that’s what snakes do
when they see a human.
I told you that so I could tell you this: about a week ago,
despite having mowed my lawn at some point within the previous month, probably
closer to the beginning than to the end of that month, I found a big damn snake
in my garage. I mean, this snake was at least three or four feet long, although
when I tell people about it, it was naturally forty feet long. I could tell it
wasn’t venomous because
of the shape of its head and because I have seen rat snakes before.
I spotted it slithering around in the corner of my garage
when I was getting out of my car. My first reaction was, of course, to get out
my phone and snap several pictures of the snake to post to Facebook. Not a lot
goes on around here, you see. When you ask me what I’ve been up to lately and I
just get real quiet instead of responding, it’s because I don’t want to say, “Well,
the other day I saw a big damn snake in my garage,” but it’s either that, or
nothing.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a really good photo of the
snake because several of my possessions were in the way, damn them, and I didn’t
want to scare it by moving the wheelbarrow and everything.
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| It's the thing with the head. |
Then I got worried that maybe I shouldn’t leave the snake in
my garage, like maybe it would crawl up into my car somehow and surprise me
while I’m driving, so I texted my friend to find out what I should do with the
snake. He advised me to pick it up with a snow shovel and remove it from the
garage. But by the time I could get out my show shovel, I couldn’t really get
at the snake anymore, because it had crawled back into its hole and was doing this:
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| I know this photo is kinda fuzzy, but I didn't want to get too close to the big damn snake. |
When the snake saw me coming with the snow shovel, it bared
its fangs at me. I texted my friend, “It just yawned at me is that a threat” to
which he replied, “It mocks you.”
Indeed.
So in the end I just stood there and stared at the snake for
several minutes, and it stared at me back. Then I realized I was in a Mexican
standoff with a snake, so I put my snow shovel away and went back in the house.
I haven’t seen the snake since. But I know it's out there, somewhere, mocking me.
