This is one of the first stories I did for Gather. It has been edited and is now re-posted. I hope you enjoy it.
YOU HAVE A WHAT UNDER YOUR KITCHEN SINK?
My beautiful 30-something daughter is the reincarnation of Mother Nature. She's a vegetarian who grows her own food. She 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 and she rescues animals. The proud owner of cats she doesn't worry about the health of mice.
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 really wanted to know WHY?
It seems the BLACK RAT SNAKE of Ontario is on the endangered species list. They can grow to be quite large 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 were no more squirrels. She and her partner went to the attic to see what was going on and discovered the biggest snake-skin they had ever seen. A Black Rat Snake had been living in the attic and cleaned out all the vermin. They were happy about that.
Soon after seeing the snake-skin she went to grab her compost bucket and discovered because 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 kept hearing noises in the walls. Or at least I thought I did.
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 me.
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Comments: 79
Does she want any more cats? Our neighbor abandoned 4 of them.
I myself like snakes and say kudos to her but my husband would have went screaming out the door daughter or not.
lol
convey my hello to he
and thanks for your lovely Birthday Wishes on my Papa's article.
Your daughter does sound adorable in that be-kind-to-animals way.:) Congratulations for raising someone with an open heart and empathy for other living creatures. We need more of them!
As for the reading lables and being overly vigilent about what I put in my body that's me. I don't buy all organic because its too expensive-but I do buy some stuff organic. I am also very much into nature and lucky me my birthday falls on Earth Day every year! I am not overboard though-kind of middle of the road.
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U wishing you laughter
One day I was doing laundry and stuck my hand in the pants pocket of one of his jeans, only to touch a live snake! The pants went flying and the snake landed in the open washing machine, which was churning away.....since the automatic thing that keeps it from churning was broken. The lid was up, the washer was doing its job and the snake fell in. What can I say? Just as buttered bread seems to land buttered side down (if you drop it), that snake hit the water as if it was magnetically drawn to it....and it wasn't even a water snake.
My son said PLENTY when he heard about it, especially since I made him fish the dead snake out of the washing machine, miraculously (mostly) in one piece. I'm usually a warm, comforting motherly type...but that day was not my best one.
We did give the snake a proper burial. My son made me, even though he should have had more sense than to leave a snake lying around the house like that.
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Kudos to your daughter. She's a better Earth Mother than I.
I wish snakes no harm but I could NOT sleep well with one roaming the house.
When I use to work for a boys home, we would snake hunt at night when the weather cooled and the snakes would warm themselves on the road. We had about every snake you could think of, until we brought home a Mojave green rattlesnake. We were then encouraged to lose our jobs, or get rid of the snakes. This was before the rattlers became a protected. Thanks for the flash to the past! 10!
Anyways, one time when leading my class around the grounds to share some ecosystem stuff, out came the huge old snake, to sun herself on the lawn. I noticed some ticks having attached itself along her neck scales. To the horror of some of the kids, but to the delight of most, I gently picked her up, and that snake absolutely loved the attention, softly wrapping herself around me and settling completely down, as I picked off one engorged tick after the other. Soon, even the most phobic of my students wanted to pet her. But such a creature can only tolerate human nervousness for so long, so I let her down from her wrap around my neck and shoulders when she started getting a bit agitated.
Now I have to share another story, which I'd forgotten a part of until one of my students, now an adult in Amsterdam, reminded me of it at a reunion some years ago. God, this is bringing me again to those tears I felt above.
I had taken the same group of kids into a nearby forest, for another lesson on various interactive ecosystems... and this is at the grade school level. One of the kids came screaming to me, saying there was a little naked bird moving in the dead leaves. When I got to it I saw a hatchling. Up the tree, I could see a woodpecker hole. I'm not one to always interfere with nature, but then, I've always taught that human decisions are as much a part of nature as the biggest bear in Alaska.
I asked us all to stay quiet for a while by sitting down to observe. Eventually, a woodpecker mother did come to the tree, and go into her hole, after which we heard a lot of peeping from her young.
So I asked a student to run back to the school and get a plastic baggy and some apple juice.
That got them all going. "Apple juice?" asked one. "Are you going to feed it to the baby?"
I wanted the suspense to reinforce their learning, and anyways, I always like playing like that. "Let's just see?" I said mysteriously.
So I went on to explain a little about this bird, and our link to it through even the air we breathe and the gas we put in cars, and the moss on the tree's north face and the dead leaves around the baby bird.
When the kid came back, I explained each step. First I washed my hands n the juice.and baggy to get rid of human scent. Then i gently picked up the little hatchling, and began climbing the tree.
And what I'd forgotten about the story until that student reminded me, was that I was severely attacked then by the mother when I put her baby back into the nest. And boy do they now how to peck like a jackhammer. There was only one other young in the nest behind and just under that hole.
In the coming weeks, we almost daily walked surreptitiously by that tree, keeping some distance. The baby was re-accepted into the family, for now, whenever the mother came with an insect, there were two distinct peeps of satisfaction from within. The woodpecker was a red bellied.
Oh, now I've got endless stories. better stop.
Thanks for this moment, Marilyn
The challenge for me is that I live in a city.
I still kill nothing and see no problem going out of my way so as not to.
Because we live in a city, Jeff and I have choosen not to won a vehicle.
We gave it up about ten years ago and I thought I was going to go crazy without a car/truck.
But we didn't, it was really no problem.
When we need a car or truck we rent one.
I was surprixed at how easy it is to live, in a city, without a car. Susan
Your daughter sounds like a wonderful person and I'm always happy to hear of people in the world that are so kind to animals of any type!