Nature Meets A Garden Hoe

So, our family was enjoying a peaceful evening out on the back patio earlier this week. We were eating pie, because my mom is amazing and makes pies very regularly. As we were talking we gradually became aware of some very angry twittering going on in the tree beside us. All mom says: "The wrens are angry about something." As the twittering, fails to subside, we go out and begin to look around the wren's bird house. Sadly, there was the last 1/3 of a black snake hanging out of the bird house entrance. My first reaction was to yell loudly for my dad, which I did. It was interesting how we began to work as a team to get the snake out of the house, and hopefully prevent any eating of the wren babies. Dad went to get the necessary tools, but I saw that he had neglected to get, in my mind at least the most crucial of snake tools, the snake noose.

Yes, we have a snake noose. There is a long legacy in my family of snake disdaining and snake disposal, and sometime during my childhood my dad felt it would be an asset to have an actual noose. So he made one, and we do use it. But I digress...

So back to the snake story at hand. My dad takes the house down and begins to dissemble it, inevitably forcing the snake to leave the house. My dad was waiting with the garden hoe. The snake didn't make it. Afterwards, my dad felt kind of bad. Black snakes are really good to have around. The eat rodents and other wily small creatures, but they also eat baby birds. There's one thing my mom can't abide -- snakes in our house or in the bird's house.

So hopefully that was our snake adventure for the summer. Usually there's one a year. There's an infamous story about my mom and the snake that dared dome into the house during my sister's wedding preparation. It wasn't pretty. My mom found it in our bathroom closet, and as she startled it by coming into the room, it began to descend down the hole from whence it came. She, being under a great deal of stress from wedding things, had had enough. She grabbed the snake and pulled hard.

Now, some of you may know that snakes' scales cling very hard to surfaces. It's really hard to get them off of something they've attached themselves to. That big black snake was no match for my mom, though. She pulled hard, and scales came flying off, and that snake was hers. Now some of you have met my mom. She's great -- the most graceful, loving, sweet, motherly mom you'll ever find. We all saw another side of her that day though. She marched down to the garage to find my dad, snake in hand. She flung it at his feet, and declared that if he didn't dispose of that snake she was going to get out her scissors and cut it into a million pieces. To this day, my dad swears all he heard was undiscernable angry noises coming from her lips. We laugh about it now...

Any way, I know they serve a grand purpose in the nature cycle. But I think snakes are icky.