Big Snake

It's Monday night, take-the-trash-to-the-curb night, one week from the night I encountered a four foot black snake slithering into our garage.

I had just gone out to load the trash into the big garbage can when I saw what looked like a big, black snake.

"That piece of rubber looks a lot like a big, black snake," I said, probably aloud.

Then it moved, moving, unfortunately, into the garage. It looked like a big, black snake because, well, it was a big, black snake. I tried to turn the light on, but the power is connected to a switch in the house, which happened to be turned off. I ran in, turned on the light and called my neighbor Vivian.

"You know those big, black snakes that you hate so much?" I asked. "Well, if one of them bites me, what will it do to me?"

Armed with little more than Vivian's reassurance that a bite from this particular snake wouldn't kill me -- though it might hurt, she conceded -- I headed back to the garage, put on a pair of work gloves, picked up the garden rake and started hunting. If there had been a pair of safety goggles handy, I probably would have put those on, too.

Digging in the wood pile -- if you can call it that when you're using a rake to rearrange firewood -- yielded nothing. Pulling the old freezer away from the wall resulted in the same thing. That was probably okay, though. What was I going to do? Somehow convince it to wrap itself around the tines of the rake long enough for me to toss it back into the yard?

As I pondered my next move, the snake slid nonchalantly out the other side of the door, having made nearly a complete circuit through the garage. More importantly for both of us, it spared me from my first attempt at snake wrangling.