A Snake In Our Yard & Its Traumatic Death

Yesterday started out like any normal day. My mom slept here, and we got up and played with Cami and put her down for a nap. Then we went outside so that I could learn how to prune my rose bushes (finally). We pruned and pruned, in the front yard and back, and started to clean up the trimmings. As I walked back into the front yard to pick up some more, my eyes fell upon something long, skinny and foreign with yellow and gray spots laying in the grass next to my mom. I completely jumped and screamed, and my mom said "What, what!!"

"A SNAAAKE!!!"

"Oooo oooooh! Oh my gooosh!!!"

"What do we do, what do we do??"

"I don't know! Do we just let it go?"

"It's moving!!!"

Being the avid photographer that I am, I leaped and ran into the house to grab my camera. And came back to this:

Can I just say: Ewwwwww. I HATE SNAKES. With a passion. The way they have no limbs, the way they slither and wriggle and leave no trace of slime, the way their beady eyes seem to taunt and threaten, their nasty little pronged tongues, the way they stick the whole first half of their bodies up in the air as if searching for their next prey, the way this supposedly harmless garden snake (if that's what he even is) could have slithered right over my bare feet in the grass that morning and made me jump higher than I've ever jumped before.

The snake so effortlessly slithered through this ground covering until it went right under our fence into the backyard. My mom and I, squealing like little school girls, pranced through the gate and followed it with our unbelieving eyes. It continued through the rose bushes and was headed straight for the house!

"It's going for the basement window!!" I exclaimed.

"That's where I sleep! I'll never be able to sleep again!"

"What do we do??"

I ran frantically through the yard and searched for any neighbors who could come to the rescue. Any little neighbor boys who could come and happily scoop this culprit up and take it home to love and cherish. But NO one was around! I grabbed my phone.

"I'll call Jake." (He always knows what to do).

Upon hearing Jake's voice, I told him frantically and in a panic what was going on. He just laughed and said, "Leave it alone." But I told him it was headed for the basement, and he replied, "So cut its head off."

And that is indeed what we had to do. Don't ask me how it came to this. But I ran into the garage and grabbed a shovel. It was my mom's idea. It's not like I had a hatchet in my back pocket. Although while we were pruning roses, there was a dead branch that wouldn't come out and I had mentioned that we needed an axe. That would have been a very handy thing to have right then.

I ran the shovel back to my mom and handed it over.

"YOU DO IT!"

"I CAN'T!"

"Yes, you have to!"

"I've never killed anything besides bugs! Besides, he's in a crack! I won't be able to get him!"

"DO IT, Mom, DO IT!"

"AAAAauugggghhhhhhhh!" And at that moment the hacking began. Gruesome. She hacked the poor thing to death. Almost. The worst part was that it would not die. The shovel wouldn't make a clean cut, and the snake kept wriggling and lifting its tail and curling it all around, and we were a complete hysterical mess. You could have heard us from the next neighborhood. Both screaming and traumatized and regretting the kill as soon as it happened. But I could not have lived, knowing there was a snake in my house. My mom tried to make herself feel better by saying:

"Well, at least snakes in the scriptures are depicted as evil. So it must not be one of God's favorite creatures."

I feel bad for putting her through that trauma. And this is what was left. She didn't know snakes had blood like that. It splattered enough that I had to spray it off with the hose. Gross, I know. I could never hunt animals. Or birds. Or any living thing except for snakes. So then we had to figure out a way to get it in the garbage. Luckily, a nice neighbor boy was riding by on his scooter. I called him over.

"Nick! We need your help! Would you be willing to scoop a dead snake into the garbage for me?"

The nice boy did just that, but the thing was hardly scoopable. It was slippery and uncooperative. Nick was a trooper. I asked him if he knew what kind it was. He said probably just a garden snake. I thanked him for his services and sent him on his way.

Jake sent me a text message 5 minutes later saying "Nick just called me and asked if he could go in our yard and look for his pet snake. He saw it slide under our fence. Have you seen it?"

I was horrified, until I realized it was a joke and Jake knew I had killed the snake. But how had he known Nick had helped us? When I asked him, he said he hadn't known. He had just picked that name out of his head. Clever. And weird.

So the snake is gone, but who knows what else is lurking out there. He could have a whole family living in that ground covering in our front yard. I never want to lay in our grass again. Oh, and to any snake lovers out there, I'm sorry.