Snakes are my oldest memory. I remember my three-year-old self, crying and angry, standing on the driveway of our house at Fort Huachucha, Ariz. I watched my dad kill a batch of baby rattlesnakes. I didn't want the snakes to die.
Twice recently, I've revisited snakes. Big Guy and I encountered a 7-foot Burmese python stretched long on the evening pavement near our Laguna Beach cabin. Non-native pythons are crushing the life from the Florida wild. Our find was an impressive specimen--one that used to ride draped lazily around its owner's head (and that would be another story). With reluctance, we called the sheriff, who called the game warden, who removed the now agitated python in a pillow case.
Snakes reentered my thoughts as Sis and I, along with Mom and others, attended the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn. Two separate tellers--one in front of hundreds of listeners, and the other simply in front of 10--related the story of the snake and the frog. Both are predators and prey as they simultaneously swallow each other and disappear. Sis missed that day of telling. An early morning phone call told her a snake bit Middle Child near the ankle. It didn't sound serious, but hours later, as tellers began to speak, another call came. Sis learned the hospital emergency room wasn't releasing Middle Child.
I advised Sis to stay at the festival--a five-hour drive from home--and let Middle Child, who is nearly 25 years old, work out the emergency with his father's help. It wasn't good advice, and Sis didn't take it. She left.
Well-mothered, Middle Child survived--snake-bitten leg intact and sleep deprived from a one-night hospital stay. Today, the snake most likely still lurks in the pine tree woods near Sis's home. No one has found it. Sis got her time to mother--as a son, no matter what the age, is still a child.
But Sis missed the tale, twice told. Snakes die when they're in the wrong place. Sometimes frogs die, too.
