I should have been paying better attention. But my husband was out of town, I was trying to read a book on the back porch, and I was sleepy. I heard something fall, and although I made a quick loop through the house, with three panting, interested dogs on my heels, I couldn’t locate the sound. I returned to the porch and resumed my sleepy reading.
An hour later I heard another noise. By then I had moved from the porch to the kitchen, where I was concocting an obscenely large pan of tiramisu in honor of my husband’s return the following day. I ignored the noise and went to the pantry for cocoa. I saw that a box of cereal had fallen onto the dog food, and an empty jar lay on the floor. Beside the jar was a 2-foot long snake.
I shut the pantry door gently. A snake in the house is never a good thing. People and dogs can get bitten. If the snake is poisonous, we can die. Complicating this particular snake/death scenario was the fact that I simply could not complete the tiramisu without cocoa. And so I scoured my brain for solutions.
I could borrow some cocoa from a neighbor. I could go to the store (as I had just bought a new can, this seemed silly). Or, I could close my eyes and reach into the pantry for the existing cocoa, thereby testing the old theory that if you can’t see something, then A) it does not exist, or B) it cannot see you. I opened the pantry door and peeked in. The snake was coiled, its tongue flicking. I shut the door. I would have to call my neighbor’s husband, Bobby, and ask him to remove the snake.
Which is when my women’s lib sensibilities kicked in. I am a child of the ’60s. Women of that era do not call men to take care of them. I decided to call my friend and dog-sitter Beth, who once called to tell me, in the kind of serene voice I reserve for reading poetry out loud, that she had removed a snake from my laundry room.
“What?” I screamed over the phone. “You whated a what from where?”
Unlike Beth, when I am under duress, my language skills devolve. Last week I watched, horrified, as a friend stood unknowingly atop a fire-ant hill. As a million angry specks ascended her sneaker and made haste for her ankle, all I could do was jump up and down, point maniacally at the ground and scream, “Thing! Thing!”
“Throw a towel over the snake, and then grab it just behind the head,” Beth advised. Only she had laryngitis, and so what I heard was, “This is no time for women’s lib. Call your neighbor!” And so I did.
Armed with a rake and a mop, my neighbor Bobby and I coaxed the snake into a bucket, and Bobby released it a half-mile away at the creek. (Later my mother would ask why I hadn’t put the snake on Petfinder, and worked harder at getting it a real home).
“Did you freak out when you found the snake?” my husband asked the following night, his mouth full of cocoa-dusted tiramisu.
While it certainly was a surprise (in general we reserve our pantry for extended families of field mice and the occasional cricket), what has stayed with me is the incongruence of it all. The discovery of something as primitive as a reptile when you are making something as urbane as tiramisu is hard for me to make sense of. Not to mention there was that waving of the women’s lib flag while deep in the throes of baking for my husband. Forget snakes, that’s just downright scary.
E-mail Dana Shavin at danalise@juno.com.