YOU HAVE A WHAT UNDER YOUR KITCHEN SINK?

While thinking about the photo I saw here yesterday, the one from Texas with the blue bells and the rattlesnake, my daughter came to mind.

My beautiful 30-something daughter is the reincarnation of Mother Nature. She’s a vegetarian, who grows her own food, buys cheese, eggs and milk from an organic farm. She would probably make her own pasta if she didn’t have a full time job at a nearby university. She reads labels, watches carefully for chemicals and lives a pretty nice life with her significant other up north in the boonies of Ontario.

I’ve witnessed my daughter get out of her car to shoo snakes off her dirt road, watched her move baby turtles hatching on the side of the road back towards the swamp, she removes bugs and spiders from her home alive, she rescues hurt animals and mice she doesn’t worry about because she has cats.

While visiting her one weekend, I went to toss onion skins in her compost pail under the sink but couldn’t because there was a lock on the cupboard. When I asked why there was a lock on her compost pail she said she moved it and it’s under the cookbook shelf. “OK. So why do you have a lock on the cupboard?” said I, and she responded, “You don’t want to know, Mom”.

Right then my skin started to crawl – now I want to know WHY???

It seems the BLACK RAT SNAKE of Ontario is on the endangered species list. They can grow to be quite huge and are no threat to humans but climb trees and are known to drop on their prey. They eat rats, mice, squirrels, and rabbits among other things.

My daughter said they were having a problem with squirrels in the attic and then all of a sudden there was no more squirrels. She and her partner went to the attic to see what was going on and discovered the biggest snakeskin they had ever seen. A Black Rat Snake had been living in the attic and cleaned out the vermin. They were happy about that.

Soon after that she went to grab her compost bucket and discovered since there was no more food in the attic the snake had come down the inside of the wall and into her kitchen “under the sink” cupboard. He was half in and half out of the compost pail.

Did that bother my daughter? Not a chance. She locked the cupboard and forgot about it. As she explained to me, the snake will leave the house when he’s hungry enough.

I didn’t sleep well that weekend…

I don’t know how long the lock stayed on but I am happy to announce she bought another home in the area and as far as I know, there are no snakes inside the premises. Or if they are, she’s not telling.