Snake

6/13/48, 3pm, The Swampy Margins of the Western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. 

I’m toddling toward the back door of my parent’s cottage.  A big Tulip tree grows nearby. Its roots have lifted and cracked, the cement path that leads to the back door.  

A fat black snake had been descending the tulip tree, it’s head and shoulders are in the ravine made by the broken cement, its tail is slithered up the tree.  

We make eye contact.  I’m frozen, hypnotized, transfixed.  The snake is frozen too.  Her slender red tongue darts from her mouth.  It has a forked tip and the whole assembly waves about, tasting the air, tasting me. She pulls back tentatively.  I jump over the crack and enter the cottage.

A pod of adults is on the front porch.  

I run to them saying, ”I just saw a snake!”  

They say, “Probably not.  Probably saw some snaky thing, like a huge centipede, or worm that looked like a snake; but wasn’t a snake.”  

I say, “Was so. It had a funny tongue that went like this.”  [Join me here if you like.]  I extend and retract my tongue real fast numerous times.

The pod of adults rushes by me in a disconcerting frenzy.  They light a fire in a burn barrel.  They gather the snake on the tines of a pitchfork and gingerly nurse it to the fire.

I was freaked. I remember the men; the fire; the snake, writhing, trying to slither into a different reality.  I ran away in tears.  My distress was blamed on the snake. Not the adult’s primitive behavior. 

Takeaway:  Adults don’t need to know everything.