Everyone has a snake story. A snake encounter or sighting. Dead or alive. But no story can be more bizarre than the recent one about a 65-year-old Texas woman, Peggy Jones, who was mowing her yard and a snake fell out of the sky.
The four-foot-long snake wrapped around Ms. Jones’s forearm. She flung her arm; the snake coiled tighter. Then a hawk attacked the snake – its prey that must have fallen from its talons. The snake clung to Ms. Jones’s arm.
The hawk tried to retrieve its meal. Finally, after several attempts, the hawk carried the snake into the sky and Ms. Jones was left with a bloody, bruised arm. Her husband, who was on a riding lawn mower and didn’t see what had happened, took Ms. Jones to the emergency room.
In a New York Times article, Mrs. Jones was quoted: “I consider myself to be the luckiest person alive. I was attacked by a snake and a hawk and I lived to tell about it.”
Surely, no one can top that encounter, but this story makes me think of my snake stories.
About a year ago, I wrote about a small green garter snake hiding inside a pair of work gloves. I put on the gloves while my two children, ages 9 and 11, and I were putting together a trampoline. Garter crawled up my arm. I wasn’t scared, but I was so startled that I screamed a four-letter word that I rarely say. Son and Daughter still remind me of that moment.
That wasn’t the first time a little green snake had shocked me. I was about 10-years-old when I was picking green bell peppers and a plant stem moved – right into my hand. I screamed and threw the snake onto the ground, and Dad ran to me.
When he saw that I wasn’t hurt, just scared, both he and I held the squirming snake. Then we carried it away from our family garden and released it into the woods. I remember Dad’s on-the-spot lesson about poisonous and non-poisonous snakes and the value of snakes living around our barn to eat rodents.
During my elementary school teaching years when a snake was presented in a lesson to students, I held it and encouraged students to touch or hold it. But I didn’t want a snake in our home so every time Daughter asked for one for Christmas, she didn’t get it.
Years later, Daughter bought Cosmo, a corn snake, when she taught 5th grade Science. Cosmo was a classroom pet, accustomed to people, and visited students’ homes over weekends. During a Christmas school break, Daughter asked that Cosmo stay in our house while she took a trip and I agreed.
Caring for a snake is simple. I checked on Cosmo regularly, fed him a frozen, then thawed, mouse once a week, and all went well until the day Cosmo wasn’t in his glass house.
A snake story for another column. But know that Cosmo wasn’t carried away by a hawk.
Filed under: Animals | Tagged: Cosmo, snake, snake story |
Susan Writes 
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