lucyoncolorado

In which there are snakes in my yard, again...

I'm in my backyard. There is a long, fat snake slithering around near my wood pile. It is bright green and yellow with a conical head. It's at least 8 inches in diameter. I know what sort of snake it is (in the dream) and I know it is not venomous. I'm not afraid of it; I'm just amazed at how fat it is.

My mother is standing near the deck spraying dirt away with the water hose. I shout at her to come see the snake but she can't hear me. For some reason, I can't shout at her loudly enough for her to hear what I'm saying. She looks at me confused.

I point to the snake. It is starting to move into the wood pile, and I'm afraid she'll miss it. I wave my hands and shout at her to come over and see. I move my arm in a slithering sort of way to represent the snake and I gesture towards the wood pile. She just stares at me in a way that shows she does not understand.

I take a deep breath and scream as loudly as I can for her to come over there. My voice is booming, but still she can't hear. I wave her over, but she just stands there.

So I abandon the snake to the wood pile and walk over to her. She's only a few feet away so I'm astounded that she can't understand me. I tell her that there is a huge brightly colored snake near the wood pile and that she should come see it. Then I turn and run back to the wood pile. She sets the hose on the grass, and there is an extremely small coral snake nearby.

She points to the coral snake and says it's not so tiny. From the wood pile I shout at her to not pick it up! That's not the snake I mean! I wonder that she could be so reckless as to pick up a coral snake! But I watch helplessly as she bends down towards it, reaches out for it and picks it up.

Luckily, it doesn't bite her because it's mouth is so tiny that it can't get a good grip. By the time I run over to her, she has already dropped it.

Are you crazy? I shout at her. You picked up a coral snake! That's insane!

She responds that she wanted to see if it was red touch yellow or red touch black. Only the red touch yellow is the venomous coral snake. Red touch black is just a harmless king snake.

I know this of course. I tell her I know this. I tell her that the point is that she can't bend down and pick one up first and try to identify it second as it would be too late by then. And anyway, the particular snake in question is a coral snake. It's red and black.

She answers that she had no way of knowing it was a coral snake until she looked at it carefully. I start to get very frustrated. I respond that this is my point exactly. She needs to err on the side of caution. She argues that it didn't matter. It was too small to bite her anyway.

I decide to let it go. I turn the conversation back around to the fat brightly colored snake in the wood pile and ask her if she wants to see it. She says yes, and as we turn to walk towards it, we see another red, black and yellow banded snake. This one is bigger.

Mom asks if it is red and black or red and yellow, and she bends over to pick it up. I grab her by the arm and stop her. I start screaming at her. Doesn't she understand that she needs to stand back and assume it is dangerous? This one is big enough to bite her. A coral snake can kill you!

She laughs at me, but she relents. We walk towards the wood pile. The snake is already gone. I tell her how brightly colored it was and how big it was. She says probably I saw the same banded snake we just left in the grass. I tell her it looked nothing at all like that one. She laughs at me some more and tells me that probably my phobia of snakes just made it look different in my mind. This is not true, I argue. I'm not even particularly afraid of snakes. I just believe in being cautious around potentially deadly ones.

By then I'm just a big mess of frustration.