Snakewort
After dark when I got home and I could smell something big somewhere in the field. A large animal but not something dead. Maybe something roaming. It was gone this morning and everything smelled fresh and clean down the driveway. I stopped to pull up a tarp I had lazily left there over winter and uncovered a pair of snakes. As wide as a waterhose, coiled, both at least three feet long. Scared me senseless. Like a copperhead but brown. What were they? I couldn't think. A mated, mature pair. I should have killed them but I let them be.
My mother was always so afraid of snakes. I remember our elderly neighbor coming over to kill rattlesnakes for us when I was a kid. I never wanted to hurt them but they scared me too. Dad always said the only good snake was a dead snake and it didn't matter what kind. Big, little, green or brown. Last weekend home I was weeding around the peonies barehanded and dug up a ground snake. Small, maybe four inches, dark black, with a bright orange underbelly. I thought at first it was a dark worm till I saw its head and then it's belly. Dropped it and crawled backwards fast into the yard. Dad knew right away and while I was dithering and wondering what kind it was, and what to do, he killed it. I had fears of a nest of them and could see them in my mind, crawling up between my fingers. I buried that bed with inches of mulch and left the peonies to fend for themselves for awhile. All spring maybe. Summer too.
I was chased by a racer as a kid. I can still see its head moving above the rows in the garden. Funny, how it chased me running the opposite direction. My mother was chased too. She never got over it. She was a little girl and their chickens nested on a hill behind her house. Her job was to gather the eggs. Nests and eggs equal a perfect places for snakes. She reached for an egg and uncovered a snake. She ran down the mountain and the snake chased. Head up and fast. She was small, about six, and she tried to jump over a barbed wire fence to get away from it but she didn't make it. She got caught on a barb. Tore into the inside of her thigh. No stitches or doctors then and that scar is ugly and wide, still.
My grandfather heard her screaming. He killed the snake. My father killed the snake. I should have killed them too.