There is a dead snake on my front stoop. John killed it as he was leaving the house this morning on the way to the gym. He left its remains there, by our door, to serve as a warning to any other snakes that may be lurking under our shrubbery and around our flowerbeds. I asked John to move it, to throw it away, but he explained this is what he was taught to do growing up in the Lowcountry.
I happened upon the snake last night when I got home from Bunko. I spotted it on the stoop, near our door, and I called to my neighbor who had walked home with me. “Robin, there’s a snake by my door! I think it’s a baby copperhead!”
Robin watched me from the yard as I inched closer to the snake to get a better look. She waited while I summoned John to the door. He’d been sleeping on the couch, and it took him a few beats to understand what was going on. “Kill it,” I ordered.
But when John disappeared inside the house to find a spade the snake slithered away, burying itself beneath the pine straw. We got a flashlight, John and I, and poked around for the snake, moving the pine straw aside and raking at the ground with the spade, but we couldn’t find it. It was gone, ours to discover another day.
“I wish you would have seen where it went,” Robin called to me from the yard. “I don’t like knowing it’s out here now.”
Last night I dreamed of snakes. They were everywhere outside. They surrounded our house and wanted to get in. In my dreams I told John that we could keep them out, these snakes, but in my heart I worried that I was wrong.
Before Archie was born, when I was very, very pregnant, John and I were asked to give our neighborhood’s garden club a tour of our yard. We lived in a different house then, and we’d filled our yard with flower and herb beds, climbing roses and blooming trees. It was beautiful and we were eager to show it off to our neighbors.
The tour was scheduled for a weeknight, and John worked the preceding weekend to ready our yard. He’d spread fresh pine straw, too, because it was fall and the time to do so, and because he wanted to refresh the garden bed as well. Our yard looked liked Eden, and our neighbors enjoyed their evening there.
After they’d gone, as I was carrying a plate of cookie crumbs and an empty pitcher into the house, up a step and then into the back door, John hollered at me to stop, and then instructed me to not move at all. He pointed to my feet and as I looked down I saw a baby copperhead coiled near my swollen ankle.
I got inside without the snake biting me, and I watched through the door’s glass as John pummeled the snake to a pulp. We’d received Archie’s diagnosis of Down syndrome and learned of his heart defect just a couple months before that night, and I remember thinking how angry John looked as hit that snake again and again with that shovel.
I didn’t see John kill the snake this morning. I heard scraping, I thought, as I lay in bed suspended somewhere in that place between sleep and awake. Yes, I do think I hear a scraping noise, I remember thinking before I turned my face into my pillow again.
If you looked on our front stoop right now, near our door, you’d see a few lines gouged into the concrete. The spade is leaning against one of the columns that holds up the porch roof, and I assume John left it there as a warning, if not as a precaution in case there are more snakes buried beneath the pine straw.
“We can’t have poisonous snakes in our yard where our kids play,” I breathed loudly in a panicky sort of way last night as I pushed the dirt around in our garden.
When I came here to share this story with you, I didn’t see yet how the snake on our porch today and that snake on our porch five years ago were connected. But I see now, after typing out these words for you.
Tomorrow is Archie’s birthday party. It’s his fifth, but it’s also his first. We never shared the celebration with friends before, and in a way we won’t again this year because the day he was born isn’t until next weekend.
There are so many things I want to share here, but I can’t. I have these thoughts and feelings and stories I want to tell, but I won’t. At least not yet, not until I’ve sorted through them some more and summoned more spiritual starch to help them stand.
What I can write now is that the old snake, the one from five years ago, threatened my baby physically. But the new snake, the one from last night, it feels like a figurative representation of a different kind of threat, of something bigger. Would you understand if I told you that it feels to me sometimes that there are snakes all around us, passing judgment on things they don’t understand? Would you know what I mean when I say that I feel now’s the time for me to decide what to do about all these snakes? Would you be surprised if I admitted to you that I’m not so sure how to go about doing it?