The most amazing snake stories slithered into our living room the other evening between six friends. Fun, fun, fun. For more than an hour these incredible tales crawled between me, Bruce and two couples. Basically, we had ourselves a snake-telling extravaganza.
I cannot choose my favorite snake story, because they were all wonderful in their own way. But here are some highlights:
One couple, who live in the boondocks but have a gorgeous garden, complete with a koi pond, once welcomed new neighbors to their neck of the woods with a lovely patio meal.
Mid-bite, he leaned over to her and whispered, “Honey, don’t look now, but a large snake just grabbed your most precious mother koi.” Of course, she looked, just in time to see a massive garden snake with her biggest, most prized koi.
The snake made its escape across the lawn, with the flopping fish clamped tightly in the snake’s mouth. But the snake was not fast enough for my friend, normally the picture of class and grace. She dashed after the snake, grabbed it, yanked the koi from the snake’s jaws, tossed the stunned koi back in the pond, flung the startled garden snake the other direction and resumed dinner, as if nothing had happened.
Can’t say if the new neighbors ever returned, but the snake didn’t.
Bruce shared a couple of whoppers, such as the time (before he had the good sense to find and marry me) his golden retriever, Chelsea, vomited onto the floor a 3-foot long, whole, horribly decayed rattlesnake. (The dog was fine. Felt much better, thank you.)
And just last summer Bruce was on the ground futzing with our drip system by a butterfly bush when he felt a bump by his leg. He looked down and saw a small rattler heading up the outside seam of Bruce’s jeans.
Glory be the power of adrenalin. It propelled Bruce into one of those yaba-daba-doo air-churning cartoon figures that allowed him to simultaneously roll, leap and jump away from the snake. But alas, when Bruce returned with a shovel to deal with the snake, it was long gone.
Hours later, when Bruce remembered he’d never finished fixing the drip by that butterfly bush, he found the same snake in the same place.
I pulled my car into the driveway after work to see my husband, a crazed look on his face, repetedly stabbing a shovel into the ground.
Honey, I’m hoooome.
Another friend, who’s not a fan of snakes now, told a story that probably created his snake aversion. He was a teenager then who lived in the South. He was mowing the grass one day when he noticed a thick black tangle of a wiggly snake body dangling from a large hole in a huge tree.
Being a good Southern country boy, he ran to the house for a gun, aimed and shot the snake. Blood ensued, down the tree. But the snake stayed put.
The friend threw up.
Later, the friend’s father came home, got a ladder, retrieved the dead snake and cut it open to investigate the snake’s lumpy body. Apparently it had feasted on a nest full of baby birds that had hatched inside that tree hole.
Our friend threw up again. (This was a common detail with these stories. Clearly, these are after-dinner tales.)
The man married to the koi-saver told of a friend who went under a home’s crawl space to shoot a giant rattler. Amazingly, the rattler died, and the man was unhurt. (How do you spell ricochet?)
Another day perhaps I’ll share some of the other critter stores told that night.
But today, I’m still thinking of snakes. I just can’t get enough of them.
Come on, let’s hear yours.
