It all started Saturday evening. I hurried home from work where Ward and Wally were waiting for me to go to the local community fair. The fair has been a favorite since moving to the area years ago and we were looking forward to seeing the exhibits and livestock as well as the ribbons Ward and I had won. (More about those in another post.) As we were going out the door, Wally casually said, "Oh, do you know there's a snake there on the wall." What?! Where? As it turns out, a snake was stuck in some painter's tape that we had on the wall next to the basement steps. We were marking how far we might be able to expand the pantry from above and the tape had been there for months. We no longer saw it. But there it was with a snake wrapped in it.
I immediately asked Wally and Ward to take a picture, so we could identify it. I was weirded out by a snake in the house, but curious all the same. I cautiously peeked and saw that it was very much alive. I took one of the pictures and started Googling to find out what kind it was. The first hit was a copperhead - one of the two kinds of poisonous snakes in our area. I knew that poisonous snakes had triangular heads as opposed to the rounded ones of nonpoisonous snakes, but I wasn't sure if this head was rounded or not. I showed Ward the pictures of the copperheads and he thought that was what we had. Then I started to freak out. It was a small snake and I envisioned a whole nest of baby copperheads in the basement ceiling, remembering all the while, the venom is stronger in younger snakes. (I have since learned that this is not true.) I worried about the cats. I wondered if there was an exterminator who made house calls in the middle of the night.
Thank goodness, Ward was calmer than I was. He carefully extracted the tape-bound snake from the wall into a bucket and took it outside. He said there was no humane way to extract the snake from the tape, so the snake died.
We then left for the fair. On the way there, I was still very worried about our house possibly being full of poisonous snakes, so we sent Aunt Martha and Uncle Billy pictures to confirm or deny our identification. While Wally and Ward went inside to look at the exhibits, I waited in the car for Aunt Martha to receive the picture. After a while, we figured out that the cell phone signal was too weak at her house to download a picture. So I joined the men at the fair exhibits, but my mind was elsewhere.
Afterward, we were supposed to go to a neighborhood star party where we were going to look at the skies through a fancy telescope, but the whole snake thing had changed the mood. We went home instead. In the meantime, we sent another picture of the snake to Uncle Billy in an email with which he identified the snake as a harmless milk snake. Looks much like a copperhead but with different shaped eyes and head. That was a relief, to say the least.
We went to bed tired and down from the energy spent on the snake episode. We didn't really talk about the whole thing until the next morning when Ward mentioned that I had gotten weird about the snake. Guilty. I am generally a calm, logical person and I was neither of those the night before. In addition, Ward felt bad that he had to kill the snake even though he wanted to release it.
Now here's the crazy part of this episode. Wally had actually seen the snake a couple of hours earlier. He didn't think much about it. He just thought I was doing some kind of nature performance art. I'm not sure what that says about me that he thought a snake taped to the wall was a perfectly natural thing for him to see at our house. :)
So you can be the judge. Do you think I was crazy, weird, or normal when I found a snake in my house?
