We
might be a little weird
A
few years ago, Jilda and I got a wild hair and painted our front
door purple. The next day when our young niece Samantha walked
over from her house next door, she said to us “you know people
around here are going to think you’re weird.” Jilda
and I both beamed with a sense of accomplishment. This column
will likely extend the audience well beyond “people around
here.”
You see, we had an old friend that lived in our barn for several years. He was
quite, polite, and didn’t leave a mess. He got rid of all the rats
and mice that lived in the barn. He also kept most of the unwanted visitors away
from the sheds. Our friend was a chicken snake. He was roughly eight feet long
and shed his skin about once a year leaving one continuous skin that looked ghostlike – if
snakes had ghosts We saw him from time to time coiled up in a tangled
mound near a loft window of the barn, warming in the morning sun. Every now and
then when I went to the barn to cut grass or fetch a tool, I saw him dangling
from a rafter or poking his head through a crack in the walls.
I have an old black and white picture of Jilda and me along with four of our
friends standing side by side holding a s skin that he had shed. It’s an
impressive graphic that shows the size of the beast.
Some time later, a neighbor that lived next door called me over to the fence. We
chatted as the warm evening sun was setting to the west. During our conversation,
he mentioned that he had killed a snake in his yard that was almost as long as
his car. My heart sank because I knew it was our old friend.
The barn remained unguarded until one Saturday during the summer of 2006. I
was painting our mailbox when I heard a commotion coming from Samantha’s
house. I dropped everything and ran over to check things out. My sister-in-law
had almost stepped on a young chicken snake about three feet long that was sunning
on the bottom step of their porch.
I reached down and caught the snake just behind the head and it quickly wrapped
its body around my arm. Debbie almost fainted. “I’ll take him
to the barn,” I said. “He better STAY there,” Debbie
warned. I believe she may be a member of the group of people who feels that the
only good snake is a dead snake.
I turned the critter loose in the barn, but I never saw where he had shed his
skin so I assumed he had followed in the path of his grandpa.
This past week I was on vacation and one day when we went for our walk, Jilda
was in front of me talking away. She and the dogs stepped over a “stick”. After
she got a few steps away, I pointed out that the stick she had just stepped over
wasn’t really a stick, but a chicken snake about seven feet long.
I grabbed my phone and shot a picture but without something near the snake to
show the scale, he looks small in the picture.
While Jilda likes the thoughts of having the snake in the barn, standing close
enough to the slider to get a picture to show scale was pretty much out of the
question.
I know that most people will agree with our young niece Samantha and think that
we are weird, but we both like the fact that Mr. Chicken Snake calls our barn
home. |